Journal of War and Culture Studies: Volume: 1 - Issue: 2

Journal of
Volume One Number Two

ISSN 1752-6272
Journal of War & Culture Studies | Volume One Number Two 2008
War & Culture Studies
Volume 1 Number 2 – 2008 1.2
The Body at War: Wounds, Wounding and the Wounded
119–121 Introduction
Nicola Cooper and Martin Hurcombe
Articles
123–138 ‘They don’t like it up ’em!’: Bayonet fetishization in the British Army Journal of
during the First World War
139–158
Paul Hodges
Painful bodies and brutal women: remedial massage, gender relations
and cultural agency in military hospitals, 1914–18
Ana Carden-Coyne
War & Culture
159–174
175–188
Raising the dead: visual representations of the combatant’s body in
interwar France
Martin Hurcombe
The veteran’s wounded body before the mirror: the dialectic of
Studies
wholeness and disintegration in Andreï Makine’s prose
Helena Duffy
189–200 Embodied memory: war and the remembrance of wounds in Nina
Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar
Helen Vassallo
201–214 Noticeboard
Stacy Gillis
intellect Journals | Media & Culture

ISSN 1752-6272
12
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9 771752 627005 www.intellectbooks.com
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Journal of War and Culture Studies

Volume 1 Number 2, 2008
The Body at War: Wounds, Wounding and the Wounded Journal Editors
The Journal of War and Culture Studies (JWCS) is the academic journal of Professor Debra Kelly
the international scholarly association, the Group for War and Culture Univ. of Westminster,
309 Regent Street,
Studies (GWACS). The journal’s principal theme is the relationship London W1B 2UW, UK.
between war and culture in the twentieth century and onwards, Tel. (+44)(0)20-7911-5000 ext 2321.
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Journal of War and Culture Studies Volume 1 Number 2 © 2008 Intellect Ltd
Introduction. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.119/7
The body at war: wounds, wounding

and the wounded
Professor Nicola Cooper University of Wales Swansea
Dr Martin Hurcombe University of Bristol
This issue looks back, on the one hand, to some of the founding work 1. GWACS eighth
undertaken by the research group GWACS1 (Group for War and Culture annual conference
‘The Body at War:
Studies, the research impetus from which the Journal of War and Culture Somatic
Studies sprang), and looks forward, on the other, to themes and approaches Cartographies
that will be developed in the future in the pages of this journal. of Western Warfare
in the 19th and 20th
The subject of the body at war is indeed a vast one, and one which has Centuries’ was held in
received increasing attention over the past few decades. Elaine Scarry’s 2004. See http://www.
extraordinarily wide-ranging meditation on the vulnerability of the wmin.ac.uk/sshl/
page-1322.
human body (1985) has provided a blueprint for many researchers in the
field. Her focus on ‘the difficulty of expressing physical pain; […] the polit-
ical and perceptual complications that arise as a result of that difficulty;
and […] the nature of both material and verbal expressibility, or more sim-
ply, the nature of human creation’ (Scarry 1985: 3), provides a compelling
portrait of the imbrication of the political with the cultural, of the ways in
which the ‘making and unmaking of the world’ are enacted through the
body in pain.
Joanna Bourke’s hugely influential work on the impact of the First
World War on the male body and masculinities, Dismembering the Male
(1996), refocused attention towards the social constructions of wartime
masculinities, thereby eschewing easy assumptions about the links
between virility and war. She shows, through thematic studies of mutilation,
malingering, bonding, inspection and re-memberment, that the experi-
ence of war ‘fundamentally affected not only the shape and texture of the
male body, but also the values ascribed to the body and the disciplines
applied to masculinity’ (Bourke 1996: 30).
The articles in this issue build upon this work, each demonstrating, in
different ways, how ‘culture’ (in its myriad forms) has reacted to the
impact of war on the human body. They discuss a number of themes relating
to the body at war: the act of wounding, the repair of wounds, the repre-
sentation of the wounded, the wounded body as metaphor, legacies of war
and wounding. In turn these themes open up further areas of enquiry: the
purposes and ethics of military training, war and the subversion of gender
roles, the political and social functions of the veteran, national narratives
of war, and the transmission of memories and legacies of war.
In her article, ‘Painful bodies and brutal women’, Carden-Coyne
demonstrates how the wounded body forces a renegotiation of archetypal
gender roles. As Susan Sontag has noted, there is shame as well as shock
JWCS 1 (2) pp. 119–121 © Intellect Ltd 2008 119

in looking at the close-up of a real horror (Sontag 2003: 37). Who has the
right to look at images of suffering, she asks; only, perhaps, those who can
do something to alleviate the suffering. The expectation of sympathy on
the part of those charged with the care of the wounded is, however, proved
misplaced in Carden-Coyne’s article. Whilst we might imagine that the
wounded body inspires pity, in the arena of war, the wounded male body
elicits atypical responses and disturbs established power relations: the
wounded body becomes a battleground of the genders.
Moreover, as Hodges’s article suggests (‘“They don’t like it up ’em!”:
Bayonet fetishization in the British Army during the First World War’),
images and descriptions of gruesome wounds were used quite conversely
to inspire blood-lust rather than empathy. This piece focuses on soldiers’
identities and masculinities, and shows how the infliction of wounds, and
the encouragement of the desire to wound and mutilate, was related to
battlefield confidence and a soldier’s sense of self. Wounding, it is shown,
becomes an assertion of masculinity, and the bayonet functions as potent
fetish which overwhelms and silences the enemy, thereby asserting the
supremacy of the British soldier.
In Hurcombe’s article (‘Raising the dead’) the wounded body and the
decaying corpse of the dead of the First World War also assert a form of
supremacy. Examining a selection of visual representations, he argues that
the grotesque treatment of the war dead and the wounded in film and
monuments serves to establish, and to maintain, the moral supremacy of
French war veterans as these attempt to gain, and then to consolidate,
greater political influence in interwar France.
The wounded body as a form of moral currency also underlies Duffy’s
article, ‘The veteran’s wounded body before the mirror’. This piece consid-
ers the novels of the Russian writer Andreï Makine, in which, Duffy
argues, the wounded body serves as a metaphor of national loss and the
dismemberment of the Soviet Union, symbolized in the striking image of
the samovar, whose shape with its stumpy handles and feet recalls the
amputated body of the combatant who has lost all his limbs. Using
Lacanian theory, Duffy goes on to argue, however, that the memory of the
wounded, dismembered Russian body is subsequently mobilized and
reassembled in a process of re-membering in order to assert continued
Russian hegemony. The unmaking of the Soviet world, to return to
Scarry’s terms, through the dismemberment of the Russian body, leads
ultimately to a remaking of the Russian world.
The memory of the wounded body is further explored in Vassallo’s article,
‘Embodied memory’. Examining the autobiographical writings of Nina
Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar, two French writers of French-and-Algerian
descent, Vassallo discusses the legacies of war and wounding in genera-
tions who, whilst they did not participate directly in war, experience its
transmitted memories and legacies as psychological trauma. The body of
each writer therefore becomes an uncomfortable reminder for the French
nation of a war that France would rather forget: the Algerian War of
Independence. The body of the descendents of Franco-Algerian relation-
ships of the 1950s and 1960s become an inconvenient presence in con-
temporary France, Vassallo argues, literally embodying the memory of a
silenced war.
120 Professor Nicola Cooper and Dr Martin Hurcombe

Forgotten wounds, silenced stories of suffering, but also the spectacle of

the wound and the wound as currency in a contest between genders, gen-
erations and even nations, these articles depict a variety of opposing uses
of the wounded body. For, as Scarry argues, whilst the act of wounding
constitutes an attempt to silence the enemy Other, to override the latter’s
ideological or nationalistic assertions about itself and its enemies, con-
comitant with the deconstruction of the world through the infliction of
wounds is the desire for world-building. The injuring of the Other reflects
the desire of each belligerent party to give material form to previously
‘derealized and disembodied beliefs’ (Scarry 1985: 128) and ideologies.
Material and human destruction therefore becomes a way of giving mate-
rial form to discourse, and the body in pain is a vital component in the
battle to assert meaning and authority. As these articles demonstrate, the
wounded body mediated by culture exists as a form of currency mobilized
by different social factions at different times in the twentieth century in a
range of struggles (gender, ideological, political, generational).
The centrality of the wounded body to war itself demands that we con-
tinue to make it the focus of scholarly enquiry. We hope therefore, in
future issues of the journal, to build upon the work on the body at war
commenced here by pursuing themes such as disfigurement and disability,
the medicalization of war, war and rape, MIAs, war dead, rehabilitation,
military training, amongst others. As Scarry has noted, ‘visible or invisi-
ble, omitted, included, altered in its inclusion, described or redescribed,
injury is war’s product and its core, it is the goal toward which all activity
is directed and the road to the goal’ (Scarry 1985: 81–82).
References
Bourke, J. (1996), Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War,
London: Reaktion.
Scarry, E. (1985), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sontag, S. (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin Books.
The body at war: wounds, wounding and the wounded 121

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Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.123/1
‘They don’t like it up ’em!’: Bayonet

fetishization in the British Army during
the First World War
Paul Hodges Birkbeck, University of London
Abstract Keywords
The bayonet was widely fetishized in the British Army in the First World War First World War
era, both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. A vibrant, rich and quickly transmitted British infantry
culture grew around this, which had real effects on the battlefields of the war. training
Supreme confidence was placed in British masculinity, a masculinity that bayonets
depended on the effective and brutal use of this weapon. Training frequently atrocity
focused on it. Both this confidence and training focus were misplaced, as in fact prisoner killing
the bayonet was not a particularly useful or effective weapon. The combination of
this strong fetishization of the weapon and its ineffectiveness had a tendency to
encourage atrocity and prisoner killing, in which some soldiers indulged keenly,
as the main opponents on whom the bayonet could be used successfully were
those who were unarmed or wounded.
It is not often that comedy catchphrase pearls have grown from a piece of
grit of historic military culture, let alone one based on wounds and wound-
ing. However, Corporal Jones’s stock epithet, ‘They don’t like it up ’em!’ from
the popular sitcom Dad’s Army seems to have done so. The character and
his catchphrase had origins in the co-writer’s Jimmy Perry’s experiences of
the Second World War and roots even further back. Jones was based on an
elderly, experienced lance-corporal under whom Perry served when aged 15
in the 19th Hertfordshire Battalion, Local Defence Volunteers (the Home
Guard’s precursor), and his catchphrase came from an instructor in the
Royal Artillery, to which Perry was later called up (Webber et al. 2001: 7–8;
Perry and Croft 2003: 15). But certainly the catchphrase would not have
sounded out of place in the British trenches of the First World War and
would not have been laughed at. Confidence in the British infantry’s prowess
with the bayonet was high and, indeed, compared with many contemporary
soldiers’ texts, Corporal Jones’s love of ‘cold steel’ is positively anaemic. Such
texts are highly revealing, displaying a self-supporting military culture, one
that was uncompromising in its attitude to opponents.
British military training at the time of the First World War laid strong
emphasis on the usage of the bayonet. This standard piece of infantry
equipment was difficult to use in open combat other than against prone
opponents. Almost by definition, these prone opponents could have been
considered potential prisoners. Despite this and other practical inadequacies,
the bayonet retained its elements as a standard-bearer, a shibboleth and,

indeed, rather a fetish for the British Army. A fetish – defined as ‘something
regarded with irrational reverence’ (Chambers 1988: 526) – is an apt
description of the bayonet, for it was held in great esteem within the
British Army despite its battlefield inadequacies. Other definitions of a
fetish – ‘an object believed to procure for its owner the services of a spirit
lodged within it’ and even ‘an inanimate object to which a pathological
sexual attachment is formed’ (Chambers 1988: 526) – are not that far off
the mark in some statements about bayonets made by troops. The latter
can be discerned in a letter dated 25 April 1915 written by Lance Corporal
W. Francis that described him and his comrades swarming up a hill and
the lust to kill is on us, we see red. Into one trench, out of it, and into
another. Oh! The bloody gorgeousness of feeling your bayonet go into soft
yielding flesh – they run, we after them, no thrust one and parry, in goes the
bayonet the handiest way.
(Gammage 1974: 96–97)
Similarly, the reported sergeant-major’s training ground cliché which

went along the lines of ‘Fix bayonets! Don’t look down! You’d soon find the
hole if there was a fucking tart on it’ (Vansittart 1981: 33), also carries a
similar sexual charge.
Unlike other weapons, the bayonet was a universal part of all infantry-
men’s equipment and concomitant with this status there had been a long-
established emphasis on bayonets in the training of the infantry soldier of the
British Army. The standard training manual frequently described its impor-
tance alongside that of the rifle. These assertions confidently began by stating
that, ‘The rifle and bayonet, being the most efficient offensive weapons of the
soldier, are for assault, for repelling attack or for obtaining superiority of fire.
Every NCO and man in the platoon must be proficient in their use’ (War
Office 1917: 91). Individual and team bayonet fighting were two of the five
events making up the annual divisional competition known as the Grand
Assault at Arms, fiercely competed for by the regular soldiers over the years.
The bayonet, however, represented much more to the British Army of
the First World War era than a ‘simple’ weapon of assault. One of its major
functions was (and continues to be) to inculcate the correct attitude in
troops. In training, the bayonet’s ability within the Army’s teaching and
practice regime to demonstrate the correct, aggressive approach towards
the enemy seems to have been the key reason for its frequent and pivotal
role in courses of instruction. It could also be argued that even by the First
World War, troop motivation had become the primary purpose of the bay-
onet, as the stances and moves taught were applicable only to earlier situ-
ations where the infantry formed tightly gathered close ranks. Technically,
the bayonets issued were not well designed and often were simply not
strong enough to carry out the actions that soldiers had been trained to
perform with them. A report by the British Small Arms School that inves-
tigated their efficiency in 1924 made this clear. Its expert authors testified
that during the First World War
the utility of the bayonet as a cutlass or dagger proved to be negligible, hence

the demand for trench knives, clubs, etc. As a means of clearing brushwood,
124 Paul Hodges

etc. it is one of the most futile instruments imaginable. Even for cutting up
duckboards and ammunition boxes for firewood it was ineffective, and it gen-
erally suffered severely in the contest […]. As a killing shape it makes a very
nasty wound, but is of a bad section for penetration and worse for with-
drawal. Owing to its great length and the leverage exerted it frequently
breaks or bends, even against straw-filled sacks and in spite of being kept
properly sharpened.
(Anon. 1924)
Other criticism in the report makes it clear that British lives were lost due
to bayonets’ unwieldiness in a fight, their propensity to glint or reflect at
night and their deleterious effect on shooting accuracy and ability, particularly
snap and sharp shooting.
Moreover, the seventeen inches or so of bayonet affixed to a four-foot
Lee-Enfield rifle, with an overall combined length of 5 feet 312⁄ inches, was
singularly unsuited to the narrow confines of most trenches. In such cir-
cumstances it was exceedingly awkward to handle and often downright
dangerous, as the medical officer Captain J.C. Dunn described in his well-
known amalgamated journal of the Royal Welch Fusilier’s war. As well as
the mud that debilitated rifles, he reported in an entry for 27 October
1914 that ‘some of our bayonets too were broken owing to the various
uses to which they were put. In those hastily dug trenches the fixed bayo-
net was an encumbrance’ (Dunn 1938: 85). Moreover, the technical defi-
ciencies of the bayonet as a combat weapon forced soldiers to use it in a
brutal manner, as mentioned by this anonymous commanding officer
recounting the planning of an attack on a troublesome enemy position
with some colleagues. Three of his companies
advancing in two waves were to deliver a rapid assault, capture the enemy’s
machine-gun emplacements at the point of the bayonet, and drive any
remaining Germans out of the wood. To those present it appeared to be a
clear case of neck or nothing, and so it was to prove.
(Officer 1918: 182)
The classic image of the First World War infantryman eviscerating ene-
mies with a bayonet to the chest or stomach (see Figure 1 for a typical
example) is therefore somewhat fictional. These images, even before their
romanticization of a brutal form of combat is considered, should be
considered as largely false as they do not depict the manner in which the
bayonet was recommended to be used in the field.
When attacking the chest with a bayonet it risked bouncing off the
ribcage without inflicting the necessary debilitating injury, or else the bayo-
net’s tip was broken or shattered completely on a rib. Sticking the enemy’s
belly risked getting the bayonet stuck fast there, even with the quarter-twist
to remove that was practised in training, as the strong stomach muscles
sealed and gripped tight around the faces of the weapon. John Lucy’s pla-
toon commander, interestingly depicting the ‘blooding of bayonets’ as
almost a passive act, warned against this risk in his pep talk before the
Battle of Mons on 22 August 1914. He told his platoon they were ‘bound to
be successful but do not forget that when blooding your bayonets, yes
‘They don’t like it up ’em!’: Bayonet fetishization in the British Army during … 125
Figure 1: Medallion art beloved by soldiers.
rather, blooding your bayonets, do not on any account bury them too
deeply. Damn nuisance you know, endeavouring to withdraw an unneces-
sarily deep bayonet’ (Lucy 1938: 99). Alarmingly soldiers could discover
how wise this advice was in the field, although it did not necessarily reduce
their verve and excitement at using the bayonet successfully. One second
lieutenant reported in a letter home dated 11 June 1915 that his
regiment did damned well, and our men fought magnificently, especially
when they could get in with the bayonet: I myself had the extreme satisfac-
tion of bayoneting three […] only in the excitement of the moment I left it
sticking in the third, and ran on with only a revolver: anyhow it must have
hurt him, when he pulled it out, if he was still alive, and I hope it did.
(Savory 1915)
The neck, while presenting a much smaller and more difficult target to
strike, posed no blade retrieval problems for the infantryman and very lit-
tle risk of any weapon breakage. That it was a more instantly deadly and
gushingly bloody method played a part in the popularity of this method.
The advice to be found in training manuals to slash at the groin is inter-
esting and similarly telling; it seemed to have been an allusion to the role
of bayonet fighting in emasculating the enemy in the most basic castrating
manner. It was couched in rather coy terms though – a ‘Rio blow’ to the
‘lower part’ for McLaglen (1916: 11) and a ‘lower stomach’ blow or ‘low
left or right parry’ for the Officer (1915). By 1931 official advice was not
so coy, with the groin and neck the only ‘pointing’ targets mentioned in
standard drill (War Office 1931: 157).
Having faded in usage somewhat during the Boer War, British observa-
tions of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 renewed interest in the bay-
onet. Interest in the force of the mass, spirited but attritional Japanese
bayonet charges was reflected in the culture and language of British First
World War soldiers, with the phrase ‘And if Turkey makes a stand / She’ll
get Ghurka’d and Japann’d’ cropping up in the chorus of the song ‘When
Belgium put the Kibosh on the Kaiser’ (Ellerton 1914: 50–52).
Did British interest in the Japanese method of massed bayonet charges
result in atrocity when contact with the enemy was made during the First
126 Paul Hodges

World War? Euphemistic hints in this direction were contained in contem-

porary bayonet training manuals, such as when Captain McLaglen details
advice on ‘delivering “point” to the downed opponent’ (McLaglen 1916:
12–13). ‘Downed’ indicates that the opponent was probably disarmed or
wounded but certainly little threat and thus protected under proper appli-
cation of military law. The British Manual of Military Law was clear-cut on
this (War Office 1914: 248).
Denis Winter goes as far as to assert that ‘no man in the Great War
was ever killed by a bayonet unless he had his hands up first’ (Winter
1978: 110). John Keegan opines, with particular reference to the first
day of the Somme, that ‘edged-weapon wounds would have almost dis-
appeared, for though the marks of bayonets were found on a number of
bodies, it was presumed that they had been inflicted after the victim
was dead; the best statistic available is that edged-weapon were a fraction
of one per cent of all wounds inflicted in the First World War’ (Keegan
1976: 264). Although this is a widely quoted piece of a hugely influen-
tial work, Keegan’s source, or possibly sources, are obscure and both
the rather vague statistic and the notion of all bayonet wounds seen
being post-mortem injuries can be doubted. Reports of the full-scale
desecration of bodies in this manner, while not unheard of, were rare,
although the checking of the status of bodies using bayonets to prod
might well be rather more commonly expected (an atrocity in itself
since this amounts to the killing of wounded soldiers). Both Winter and
Keegan do then overstep the mark; neither paints an accurate picture
of bayonet usage during the war.
The disappearance of edged-weapon wounds was not the contempo-
rary impression. Indeed, the major medical manual of the war thought
that wounds caused by bayonets, knives and so on were on the increase.
The manual’s author stated that ‘cold steel’ was the cause of 5 per cent of
soldiers’ wounds; compared to well under 1 per cent in the 1870 Franco-
Prussian war, but less than the 10 per cent rate sometimes reached during
the 1912–13 Balkan wars (Delorme 1915: 1–2).
There were certainly occasions when bayonet wounds among the
opposition could be very common, as reported by Dunn after his battalion
conducted a large raid on The Warren, south of Festubert, on 5 July
1916. It is possibly significant that the raid was in retaliation for the
deaths suffered by the regiment when a large German mine created Red
Dragon crater on 22 June. Dunn, a medical officer, states clearly that
‘most of the wounds were from shell and bomb splinters, and occurred in
A-Company, whereas bayonet-wounds were commonest among the
German-prisoner wounded’ (Dunn 1938: 221). There were certainly
many further actions that were widely and authoritatively reported to
have been carried out by use of the bayonet. It is perfectly correct to sus-
pect that the vast loss of life during the course of the war due to bullet,
shell and disease did massively outnumber these small-scale, isolated
bayonet-wound incidents. So Keegan’s overall fraction of well under 1 per
cent of deaths caused by bayonets might be correct. However, it is worth
recognizing that the pattern of warfare was by no means even. At differ-
ent times, in different units, and in different places bayonet wounds could
even have been common.
The foundations of the fetishization of the bayonet were built upon its
role in supporting troops’ self-confidence. In part, this comfort was derived
from the fact that the bayonet could indeed sometimes be effectively used.
In some circumstances, its real power as a psychological weapon could
melt enemy resistance with little real fighting required. Thus the bayonet’s
relatively rare but hugely psychologically impressive role in a rout was
central to its fetishization. Similarly, an effective, successful bayonet charge
could sometimes be far more enticing a method of victory than other
means of achieving it, such as outflanking or prolonging trench warfare.
On other occasions there was little real offensive alternative to a bayonet
charge (Griffith 1981: 70).
More comforting still was the bayonet’s utility as a last line of defence
or offence, as in this incident proudly recorded in an official brigade war
diary on 26 December 1914: ‘In the wake of a British attack on December
18–19, the Germans reported that most of their wounds were caused by
bayonets, because their opponents’ rifles were jammed’ (20th Infantry
Brigade 1914: 102). There was some truth in the conceit that whatever
the situation, whether it was wet, muddy weather, or the non-appearance
of ammunition and so on, you could rely on your trusty bayonet. Such
beliefs could haunt British soldiers, as described here by an officer who
was advancing with his troops to a vicious ongoing skirmish when he
encountered a few retreating, ragged survivors of the battle described as
shattered, nerveless men whose human nature had been tried past
endurance – now came surging back in twos and threes. Especially memory
recalls the drawn haggard face of an officer who was making rather pathetic
attempts to reform these twos and threes. He chattered wildly, disconnect-
edly, yet with a method of sense like a drunken man; ‘The bay’net!’ he kept
repeating, ‘that’s the thing for them. Show them the bay’net, get at them
with the bay’net, and they’ll run…’
(Officer 1918: 178)
The major contribution that their presumed prowess with the bayonet
made to supporting British soldiers’ self-confidence was the thought that
Germans greatly feared bayonets. ‘They don’t like it up ’em!’, indeed! This
comforted the troops, reassuring them of their supremacy as soldiers and
men. If popular, patriotic adventure stories had helped form a myth of
empire that was ‘the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night’
(Green 1980: 3), then the stories of easy slaughter and terrified Germans,
told in the press and between soldiers themselves, formed a myth of the
bayonet that helped soldiers as they went to sleep at night. Immediately on
the outbreak of war, The Times was keen to reassure its readers that
German infantrymen were jittery and eminently defeatable via the bayo-
net. The third headline after ‘First French Battle’ on its main news page for
Monday 10 August 1914 was ‘Germans routed with the bayonet’, a report
on French troops occupying Altkirch ‘after a sharp action in which they
drove the defending German force before them with the bayonet’ (The
Times 1914a: 6). Similarly, four days later, the fourth main news headline
after ‘French Frontier Success’ was ‘Village taken by bayonet charges’,
reporting that Lagarde ‘was carried by the French infantry in bayonet
128 Paul Hodges

charges with great dash’ (The Times 1914b: 6). When the war dispatches 1. General Jack was pro-
carried by the newspapers grew in depth and length, a focus on the moted in rank twice
during the war.
Germans’ inadequacies as men is noticeable. The report of the thoughts of Throughout this
a Lieutenant Deppe, in charge of a small group of Belgian troops who had article his rank as
landed in Folkestone having escaped from Namur, before his enthusiastic given in the text is
correct for the date
return to the front, is typical. He described the opponents as of the diary entry
quoted.
very well organized but German soldiers were great cowards. ‘They are very
much afraid of the bayonet, especially the French bayonet,’ he said. ‘When
they see a bayonet they turn and run. The Turcos say, “When we hit one
German with a bayonet five fall down” and that is perfectly true.’
(The Times 1914c: 7)
Undermining German masculinity seemed key to supporting Allied masculin-

ity. It was when the British forces got into action that the press really went to
town with their bayonet fetish. A report on ‘Tournai and after’ on 29 August
1914 produced this remarkable paragraph entitled ‘BAYONET WORK’:
The German infantry fire here, as elsewhere, appears to have been very bad
though the artillery work was deadly. At times the fighting was hand to
hand and repeatedly our troops made excellent use of the bayonet. ‘Man,’
said a stalwart Highlander, almost with glee, ‘ye should hae seen them rin
miles frae the wee bit of steel.’
(The Times 1914d: 8)
Again, the reports attempted whenever possible to undermine German mas-

culinity and even in this article entitled ‘In the fighting line’, their humanity.
Germans were described as more like common swine than men when facing
bayonets. The author is apparently directly quoting a private in the Black
Watch, who reported that ‘the Germans don’t like the bayonet. If you go
near them with a bayonet they squeal like pigs. When you are taking them
prisoners they go down on their knees, evidently afraid of what is going to
happen’ (The Times 1914e: 6). Animalistic, de-humanizing descriptions fre-
quently extended to the bayonet itself, most often in the form of ‘pig-sticker’,
but in this case as a harpoon. Sapper Edward Hughes, watching the 4th
Australian Division attack on the Oosttaverne Line on 7 June 1916, thought
it was a magnificent, though dreadful sight to witness […] To watch the

Huns run out of their trenches towards us – and to see the way the ‘Ossies’
harpooned them one after another, it was a sight that I shall always recall.
(Passingham 1998: 131)
Concomitant with its prominent position in popular military psychology

and imagination, rituals developed around the bayonet, particularly prior
to battle. Captain J.L. Jack1 described a typical ritualistic scene in his diary
on 12 September 1915. His divisional reserve troops had been made
aware of their participation in a forthcoming attack:
There is an immediate tuning up for action, the sharpening of ‘swords’ – as

bayonets are called by rifle regiments – the practising of assaults, inspection
of gas masks and special equipment, and all the other horrid ritual for battle,
from which all ranks may draw their own conclusions…
(Jack 1964: 110–11)
Such rituals can be observed in the official British films of the war, as well
as more mundane but tellingly prominent shots of troops just fiddling
about with bayonets. Shots of cheering Tommies waving their bayonets
with buoyant enthusiasm were frequent throughout British films and
newsreels of the war.
The sheer presence of the bayonet seems to have inspired excitement
and confidence; and it is particularly striking in many primary texts that
overwhelming belief was invested in the bayonet and the power of ‘cold
steel’. Lieutenant M.L. Walkinton provided a typical example. His 24th
Machine Gun Company was in close support to the 2nd Battalion,
Northamptonshire Regiment in their advance towards Bellewaarde Lake
on 31 July 1917. All the men were ‘very excited and elated. Bursting
shells gave light to see by and it was thrilling to see the Northampton bay-
onets flashing as the troops advanced. Surely nothing could stop us’
(Walkinton 1980: 131). Such belief and over-confidence could prove fool-
hardy and deadly, as a Scottish territorial, Harold Stainton, reported from
near Kemmel in December 1914. One of his men witnessed a charge of the
Gordons and
told me that a fine young subaltern of theirs who led his men through the
hedge carried a sword (already a most unusual thing). Waving this ridiculous
toy he rushed ahead shouting ‘Scotland for ever!’ only to be killed within
twenty yards of our hedge. It was an attack far more in common with the bat-
tles of the eighteenth-century than the battles of eighteen months later on the
Somme. Here was no slow steady advance behind a creeping barrage of shell
fire, but the wild rush so dear to Highland tradition, with effective use of cold
steel. Never, at any stage of the war, did I see so many bayoneted corpses as I
did when, a few days later, we occupied that German trench.
(Stainton 1914: 23)
Trust in ‘cold steel’ as the ultimate effective intimidation, hated by the

enemy, continued right up to the highest levels, as can be seen in Haig’s
diary, as he described the recovery of some trenches lost to the enemy in
Ypres area on 23 October 1914: ‘The Germans resisted until the very end
and gave way only when machine guns were enfilading their trenches at
very close range, and when they were threatened by cold steel’ (Cooper
1935: 195–96).
With such high-level support it is unsurprising that bayonet training
had a high profile within the base camp training that troops received and
in the further training exercise undertaken behind the front lines, awaiting
or between actions. Notes taken by an officer preparing to provide infantry
training in 1915 indicate that bayonet training in the British bases was
undertaken daily and was rigorous. The notes envisaged much of the
training being done on a course, the highlight of which would be a
specially constructed lengthy zig-zagging trench, with at least nine dum-
mies waiting to be bayoneted, mainly on the corners (Seys-Philips 1915).
130 Paul Hodges

Such courses were not the limit of the bayonet in training though; the field
exercises of more advanced training would always end in a bayonet charge
also (Hall 1916: 28). An identical focus was maintained at the main train-
ing base in France, the daunting Étaples. Private Frank Bass described a
typical day there in a diary entry dated 17 September 1916, expressing
some surprise that there was no let-up at all for a Sunday. It was
apparently [the] same as any other day. Reveille 5.30. Breakfast 6. Parade
8.00 for ‘Bullring’ or No. 2 Training Camp. Bayonet fighting with the Royal
Scots. 8 of us, including Adams, Coulson and myself, went over final assault
and went over all right, I think. After this, rapid loading and firing and then
bayonet fighting again.
(Bass 1916)
By 1916, bayonet training actually became more dominant in a trainee

soldier’s preparation for the trench war at home and abroad. Second
Lieutenant Harold Mellersh was puzzled to discover this, and contrasted it
with the training he had undergone just over a year earlier. He returned to
his base camp in Plymouth in October 1916 upon recovery from an injury
and found that there was surprisingly little for him to do, as the
training of recruits was now even not much in the hands of the ordinary
sergeants, let alone the officers: the accent had shifted to bayonet drill, with
rows of stuffed dummies strung up on wires and experts, specially trained in
simulating and stimulating ferocity, in charge. ‘In! Out! Jab!’ I don’t think we
won the war at all by ferocity, or that the attempted inculcation of it suited
the British temperament.
(Mellersh 1971: 105)
Mellersh’s doubts over the pertinence and suitability to British troops of

such prolonged and inflamed bayonet training were rare among officers or
NCOs of the time. In his analysis of fears of brutalization, Jon Lawrence
(2003: 577–89) makes it clear that, aside from isolated radicals and paci-
fists, such as Norman Angell, fears concerning troops’ brutalization did
not form a major issue during the war but only exploded post-war.
Officers at the front responsible for arranging training for the troops
under them during periods away from the front line often relied on bayo-
net training, again mainly for its attitudinal benefits. The typical attitude
of those in authority is expressed here by an officer in charge of a com-
pany, fresh from the heat of hard battle on the Somme in July 1915, who
approved of the fact that activity was maintained whilst troops were nom-
inally ‘resting’ near the Bois de Dames. He was glad to ‘use the time here
to renew clothing equipment etc. and to repeat musketry, close order drill
bayonet fighting etc.’ (Gore-Browne 1915: 6–7).
But it was not only officers who were keen on bayonet training. Private
John Jackson, returning to training after an injury in 1916, recalled that
there
was much practice in bombing, and bayonet fighting and we put in some
hard and tiring work. But if it was hard training it was also interesting and we
had great fun among the dummy figures, representing ‘Jerries’ in trenches,
on our training ground. As a result of constant practice we became very pro-
ficient in the use of the rifle and fixed bayonet, but as a degree of proficiency
in the art of using a bayonet might one day mean the difference between life
and death for each of us, it was to our advantage to know all the tricks.
(Jackson 2005: 85–86)
The support ‘from below’ that could exist for their officers’ views of
bayonet training is therefore clear in this private’s words.
It was not only in prior training and periods of spare time on the front
that bayonet training was utilized as a handy filler. Significantly it was
also used more extensively during the important periods leading up to
large battles as the most adroit preparation. Major Jack on 15 July 1917
described his men getting strident advice during their battle training prior
to the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele):
The day before yesterday a bloodthirsty fellow, Colonel Campbell, the Army
bayonet-fighting expert, gave a lurid lecture to a large, thrilled audience on
the most economical use of the bayonet, and to arouse the pugnacity of the
men. He pointed out that to plunge the blade right through an opponent is
a waste of trouble, and that three inches in the heart are quite sufficient.
The cold-blooded science of the business seems to me rather horrid, even if
necessary.
(Jack 1964: 227)
The ubiquitous Colonel Campbell could well have been one of the most
influential British soldiers of the war (Gray 1978: 26). His memorable lec-
tures were very well attended throughout the war. Lectures of the type that
Campbell delivered so forcefully could have a direct effect on the battlefield.
An exact mirror of the three-inch advice is contained in one private’s
uncompromising letter home dated 14 September 1918. He promised:
I shan’t take many prisoners when it comes to going in the thick of it, a rifle
and bayonet with three inches at each Bosh I come in contact with at close
quarters. The more we send to Heaven, the sooner the war will be ended.
(Spelman 1918)
Campbell’s advice to use short stabs was also memorably reported by

Siegfried Sassoon: ‘“The bullet and the bayonet are brother and sister.” “If
you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you.” “Stick him between the eyes, in the
throat, in the chest.” “Don’t waste good steel. Six inches are enough”’
(Sassoon 1930: 6).
The effectiveness of such training at home and abroad for actual warfare
is debatable, as truly practical training for using a bayonet is far harder than
for other weapons of war. Throwing a grenade into a dummy trench or aim-
ing a rifle at a target are not so different activities from the real tasks at hand
in actual battle. Bags of straw – the usual target for bayonet practice – are
very different from animate humans. It is interesting to note that bayonet
training seems to have only relatively rarely taken the form of fighting one
another with wooden replicas affixed or such like, as had previously been
132 Paul Hodges

the case with sword fighting. Training for using the bayonet instead seemed
to be singularly unrealistic. The artificial and unhelpful pike-influenced drill
stances that had been practised and drilled during training were swiftly
abandoned on the battlefield, as suggested by Lance Corporal Francis’s
description quoted above, of bayonet action as being with ‘no thrust one and
parry, in goes the bayonet the handiest way’ (Gammage 1974: 96–97).
However, bayonet training remained popular both at home and at the
front and one of the major reasons for its popularity, both with the men
and officers, was its aggressive content. The aggressive nature and con-
tent of bayonet training was often emphasized. This even comes across in
the official training textbooks; one later edition stated plainly and
tellingly that ‘bayonet fighting produces lust for blood’ (War Office 1917:
97). The simple act of wielding a bayonet was popularly imagined to
have an immediate and powerful brutalizing effect on men. It was no
accident that the limited time allowed to complete the bayonet assault
course was popularly known in soldiers’ slang as the ‘mad minute’. The
extreme nature of the training, based as it was on such texts and the
enthusiasm of trainers, is often vividly described in anecdotes. Sassoon
again turned to an anonymous trainer clearly based on Colonel
Campbell:
The star turn in the schoolroom was a massive sandy-haired Highland Major
whose subject was ‘The Spirit of the Bayonet’. […] He spoke with homicidal
eloquence, keeping the game alive with genial and well-judged jokes. He had
a Sergeant to assist him. The Sergeant, a tall sinewy machine, had been
trained to such a pitch of frightfulness that at a moment’s warning he could
divest himself of all semblance of humanity. With rifle and bayonet he illus-
trated the Major’s ferocious aphorisms, including facial expression. When
told to ‘put on the killing face’, he did so, combining it with an ultra-vindictive
attitude. ‘To instil fear into the opponent’ was one of the Major’s main maxims.
Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.
(Sassoon 1930: 14–15)
The titling of such lectures with the phrase ‘The Spirit of the Bayonet’, and
the frequent references to this, are interesting. Although the phrase was
no doubt often used unthinkingly as a mere stock epithet, the logic behind
it, conscious or unconscious, was to imbue the physical object with an
emotional life of its own. The bayonet itself was thought of as aggressive,
vicious, bloodthirsty and murderous, rather than the man wielding it.
Indeed, once the bayonet was in use, soldiers’ descriptions and recollec-
tions display a tendency to erase the agency of the combatant: it is as if the
bayonet’s owner appeared to have no choice but to go along with its spirit.
This has the effect of placing a comfortable distance between the man and
the act of killing. For example, when Private John Jackson of the Cameron
Highlanders recalled his first major battle experience at the Battle of Loos
he admitted that the Germans
fought hard, but could not stand against our determination, and our terri-
ble bayonets […] Machine-gunners slaying us from their hidden posts,
threw up their hands crying ‘Kamerad’, when we got within striking
distance, but these deserved and received no quarter. Cold steel and bombs
did their duty then, and the village was strewn with dead and running
with blood.
(Jackson 2005: 54)
Here the step away from causing death, provided by the bayonets being
described as ‘terrible’ rather than the soldiers wielding them, and both
cold steel and bombs as doing ‘their duty’ rather than the men themselves,
is clear.
The psychology, often running along such lines, that underpinned the
strenuous training in the bayonet was understood by men in the field of
combat. In a section of memoir covering the summer of 1917, an infantry
captain, Stormont Gibbs, mused on the hatred and conquering of fear
needed to turn a man into an effective killer. Gibbs noted that
In any sort of hand fighting there are the savage emotions that motivate the
shot or thrust. The great horror of war is this prostitution of civilized man.
He has to fight for his country and to do so has in actual practice to be bru-
talized for his country; he has to learn to hate with the primitive blood lust of
the savage if he is to push a bayonet into another human being (who proba-
bly no more wants to fight than he does). Need he hate? In the case of the
average man he must as the counter-balance to fear.
(Gibbs 1986: 132)
Care must be taken not to react too strongly to ghoulish sentiments about
the bloody physicality of the bayonet. As the above quotation indicates,
this was a concern for some troops contemporarily also, but one that was
subsumed by the necessity not to be frightened. Frightened soldiers could
not have fought with a bayonet effectively. Confidence was a vital require-
ment; the bayonet was useless as an effective psychological weapon with-
out it. Only a confident bayonet charge could effect a rout. Bayonet
training was thus by no means unnecessary – or at least it would not have
been had the level of bayonet fighting that was expected been achieved
and if the standard-issue British bayonet had been more capable of achieving
the tasks expected of it.
It is also worth remembering in this context that bayonet fighting fell
into the category of combat exchanges that soldiers generally found psy-
chologically untroubling. It was not ‘senseless’, unlike shell deaths which
soldiers frequently found very disturbing. Many soldiers summed up the
sense of bayonet fighting neatly as ‘him or me’ and such an equation
disturbed them little.
Despite these contexts, the effect of the aggression and hatred
included and inculcated during training on the men who underwent it
could however remain startling, approaching a ‘primitive blood lust’.
William Johnson, a private in the 22nd London (‘Queen’s’) Regiment,
described the immediate preparations for an attack on 7 November 1917:
‘“Fix bayonets!” yells the colonel. And the shining things leap from the
scabbards and flash in the light as they click on the standards. They seem
alive and joyous; they turn us into fiends, thirsty for slaughter’ (Johnson
1930: 323).
134 Paul Hodges

This conception of men undergoing a transformation by wielding bayo-

nets was frequently referred to in soldiers’ texts. Patrick MacGill described
the transformation wrought on his comrades by heavy hand-to-hand action
on the first day of the Battle of Loos, 25 September 1915. He found it
interesting to see how the events of the morning had changed the nature of
the boys. Mild-mannered youths who had spent their working hours of civil
life in scratching with inky pens on white paper, and their hours of relaxation
in cutting capers on roller skates and helping dainty maidens to teas and ices,
became possessed of mad Berserker rage and ungovernable fury. Now that
their work was war the bloodstained bayonet gave them play in which they
seemed to glory. ‘Here’s one that I’ve just done in,’ I heard M’Crone shout,
looking approvingly at a dead German. ‘That’s five of the bloody swine now.’
(MacGill 1916: 84)
M’Crone is portrayed as the most transformed. MacGill had ‘never heard

him swear before, but at Loos his language would make a navvy in a
Saturday taproom green with envy’. Previously of religious turn of mind
‘now, inflicting pain on others, he was a fiend personified […]’ (MacGill
1916: 84–85).
But the aggressive training in the bayonet appears to have had even more
grave consequences; that of facilitating atrocity and war crimes. Primary
sources suggest that closing in on the enemy with bayonets encouraged the
murderous killing of prisoners or potential prisoners. Wielding a bayonet
seemed to reduce soldiers’ faculty to grant mercy. H.E. May, a sergeant in
the Highlanders, portrayed a bayonet assault in a way that was typical of
these sorts of depictions. He described a generic attack, although it seems to
have been in the context of experience he had on the Ypres salient in late 1917:
You see a line of stumpy tree-trunks that, dimly, you realize is the objective.
You creep up. A wild melee; stabbing with a bayonet. A gushing of blood
from many wounds (oh! the nauseating smell of freshly spilled human blood
in quantity), and then a cry of ‘Kamerad!’ and a whine for mercy. Unheeded,
for all the enemy died.
(May 1930: 200)
At times, the fetishization of the bayonet directly affected the mood and
conduct of soldiers on the battlefield. T.H. Gore-Browne was stationed in
trenches in front of Rue de Tillelay, Laventie, and wrote of the expectations
of some troops newly arrived at the front in August 1915. He had com-
mand of ‘a squadron of North Irish Horse […]. They are awfully sick at the
class of warfare we are waging at present. I haven’t a notion of what they
expected – a sort of orgy of shooting and stabbing I suppose […]’ (Gore-
Browne 1915).
What do such expectations of an ‘orgy of stabbing’ in fresh troops
reveal? They reveal strong tendencies for bayonet fetishization within the
British infantry in the First World War, as has been suggested throughout
this article. Moreover, such tendencies appear to have been transmitted to
new troops potently and quickly, and possibly in an increased manner.
A spiral of violence is not hard to conceive from this source.
To conclude, the fetishization of the bayonet often appeared to have

been the direct result of the excesses involved in infantry training at the
time. The strong fetishization that had built up in the Army around this
complicated and revealing weapon had the potential for deleterious effects
on the battlefield, tending to veer towards and facilitate atrocity.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a paper given at the GWACS Body at War Conference in
June 2004. I am grateful for useful comments from attendees and other read-
ers, particularly Joanna Bourke, Gary Sheffield, Adrian Gregory and Jessica
Meyer.
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Suggested citation
Hodges, P. (2008), ‘‘They don’t like it up ’em!’: Bayonet fetishization in the British
Army during the First World War’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1: 2, pp.
123–138, doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.123/1
Contributor details
Paul Hodges completed a Ph.D. titled ‘The British Infantry and Atrocities on the
Western Front, 1914–1918’ in 2007 and plans to publish it shortly under the
title: Cold and Hard. He is also associated with Birkbeck, University of London.
Contact: Dr Paul Hodges, Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, 27
Sussex Place, London NW1 4RG.
E-mail: phodges@rcog.org.uk
138 Paul Hodges

JWCS_1.2_03_art_Carden.qxd 2/28/08 4:36 PM Page 139
Painful bodies and brutal women:

remedial massage, gender relations
and cultural agency in military
hospitals, 1914–18
Ana Carden-Coyne University of Manchester
Abstract Keywords
Military culture in the First World War was predicated upon the Victorian First World War
dichotomy of active male and passive female in social roles and physiological sta- gender
tus. A soldier’s ability to fight and wield armaments framed his embodied citi- pain
zenship. Once wounded, however, military medicine took a different view of the the body
soldier’s body, mapping onto his broken flesh notions of passivity that implied military medicine
femininity and infantilization. The presence of female therapists in military hos- cultural history
pitals reversed the gendered and class dimensions of nineteenth-century allied
medicine. Women now had power over the wounded body. They inflicted pain
upon patients to a degree that was, at times, scandalous, and ignited institu-
tional struggles amongst medical authorities. Whilst the process of physical
rehabilitation was treated as a re-gendering process, and pain endurance built,
controversially, into the practice of remedial massage, new social relations were
created between men and women. This generated a significant body of cultural
work that reveals the complexity of class and gender dynamics in military medi-
cine and hospital life during wartime.
The First World War brought a major reversal in the class and gender rela-
tions of remedial massage used to treat wounded soldiers. As this female-
dominated workforce entered the military sphere – giving them new
modes of power over the male body – men encountered female expertise
and authority. In the nineteenth century, private patients of masseuses
were often female and middle class, diagnosed with neurasthenia and
treated with rest cures (Palmer 1907: 6; Creighton Hale 1904: 5; Ellison
1904: 4; Despard 1911: 1; Kellogg 1909: 53). War meant that patients
were now men and often working class. Although this required changes to
the social relations of practitioner codes, therapeutic attitudes to the
wounded body demonstrated a tension between the science of massage
and the condition of male fragility. Victorian gender constructions were
built into the therapeutic model. Wounded male bodies were considered
weak, reduced to women’s natural state. Men’s minds too were thought to
be as irritable as the neurasthenic middle-class woman. Male patients
undergoing rehabilitation and those confined to beds were characterized
by medical authorities as passive bodies. Physiotherapists ‘administered’

1. In 1920, it became various forms of ‘passive’ movement and manipulation on the stumps of
the Chartered Society
of Massage and
amputees, reinforcing the gender inversion of wounding.
Medical Gymnastics, Gendered perceptions about male and female bodies in the military hos-
and in 1944, the pital are the subject of this article. Drawing upon both British and
Chartered Society of
Physiotherapy (CSP),
American experiences, the article considers the gendered and class dynam-
indicating the shift in ics that socialized conduct around massage. With the supply of trained
terminology. masseuses to the military during the First World War, the masseuse’s
working environment moved from the domestic arena to the military hos-
pital. This essay examines continuities and shifts in treatments and the
social relations that occurred within this masculinized and disciplinary
space. Built into the techniques of massage was a therapeutic discourse
about the passivity of the wounded male body and the strength of the
physical therapist. Inverting Victorian gender relations, both patients and
practitioners characterized their own bodies in this way. This essay probes
how remedial massage (as part of physiotherapy) generated new social
interactions around class and gender. Women’s newly professionalized
and yet physical role enabled ‘medical touching’ of men by women to
become acceptable. Moreover, with their new ability to inflict pain on
men’s bodies, women and men came to negotiate the gendered inversion
of bodily contact. Analysing the social impact of military medicine
upon perceptions about women’s physicality and men’s weakness, this
essay uncovers the silent voice of the male patient, his observations of bodies
and behaviour (Porter 1985: 167). Male patients responded to these new
intimate bodily relations with creative agency. With cartoons and poems,
men countered the disciplinary regimes of the female therapist with sexu-
alized visions of female tormentors. Masseuses, too, participated in hospital
magazine production. This article argues that the body politics of remedial
massage contributed greatly to the culture of the wards, and that this cul-
tural work reveals a much more complex picture of military hospital life
than has previously been seen.
Dominating the industry: female entrepreneurs, teachers

and writers
Mechanotherapy, reconstruction or physical therapy, remedial exercise
and medical gymnastics were terms used for various forms of rehabilitation
practice employed in the First World War to heal the bodies of wounded
soldiers. Whilst rehabilitation was arranged in military hospitals, conva-
lescent homes and workshops directed by male orthopaedic ‘specialists’,
physical therapy and remedial massage was the preserve of women.
Physicians agreed that men should only train as masseurs if they played
the violin or piano, and had equally ‘sensitive hands’ as women
(Swietochowski 1914: 2). Between 1900 and 1914, nearly all of the 2,657
students who qualified at the Incorporated Society of Trained Masseuses
were women.1 The Society almost had a monopoly on teaching, issuing
certificates of qualification and supplying remedial masseuses to hospitals.
During the First World War, 90 per cent of military medical masseuses had
received their qualifications from the Society in London (Lambert
1916a: 789).
The war brought a need for many more trained masseuses and physical
therapists, increasing the number of training schools and raising the profile
140 Ana Carden-Coyne

of the profession. At Chatham Hospital, treatments rose from a total of

3,178 in October–December 1914 to 9,333 in 1915 (Director General of
the Medical Department 1916a). Industry leaders published more, with
manuals adjusting to include the treatment of wounds ‘most necessary at
the present time’ (Palmer 1918: v). Numerous private schools were offi-
cially supported. Women entrepreneurs with medical qualifications
included Dr Mary Coghill-Hawkes and Dr Mary Magill (Swedish Institute
of Massage and Remedial Exercise and School of Medical Electricity);
Dr Florence Barrie Lambert and Dr Elizabeth Patterson (Training College
for Massage and Remedial Gymnastics); Dr Justina Wilson (School for
Swedish Remedial Exercises). Female directors without the status of physi-
cian included Miss E.M. Field (the School of Swedish Medical Gymnastics
and Massage); Mrs Jenkyn-Brown (Birmingham Massage School); and Mrs
Marriott Fox (Manchester Massage Training), whose certificates were offi-
cially recognized by the War Office (Nursing Times and Journal of Midwifery
1916: 1).
Alongside private training schools, female benefactors led the way in
supplying massage therapists to the Navy (Lady Salisbury) – welcomed by
the Director General of the Medical Department of the Navy, the Admiralty
and the Treasury (Director General of the Medical Department 1916b);
and Mr and Mrs Almeric Paget (Almeric Paget Massage Corps) supplied
1,300 masseuses to the War Office Committee (R.T. Mackenzie 1916:
217). Trained masseuse Eleanor Essex French, daughter of Field Marshall
Lord French, was honorary secretary of the Corps, responsible for the supply
to hospitals. With the rising toll of orthopaedic injuries, massage depart-
ments not only became important in military hospitals, but general hospi-
tals also had to transform their infrastructure to include the facilities, such
as the Fourth London General Hospital, Ruskin Park, which had sixteen
staff and hydrotherapy and electrotherapy equipment.
Whilst in Britain mechanotherapy had long been well regarded
amongst medical professionals, its female leaders had to ward off increas-
ing competition from within the medical profession, precisely because it
was quickly adopted into military practices through the War Office. By con-
trast, in the United States, the equally female-dominated Physiotherapists
Association was allied with the American Medical Association (AMA) in
order to substantiate itself as a scientifically based and highly educated
profession. Over 90 per cent of reconstruction aides had higher degrees in
physical education before taking the War Emergency Course set up by the
Army Medical Department (Linker 2005a: 325). The professionalization of
physiotherapy offered women a more gender-neutral opportunity and offi-
cial recognition of their allied medical expertise (Linker 2005b: 118).
Colonel Emma E. Vogel was appointed reconstruction aide at Army
General Hospital No. 24 (Pittsburgh). In 1919 she organized the first
training course at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital (Washington DC),
which attained professional recognition from the AMA. Vogel later joined
the Surgeon General of the Army’s Office and was instrumental in setting
up the American Physical Therapy Association (WRAMH Colonel Emma
E. Vogel, n.d.). There was a steady increase in the publication of textbooks
by industry leaders such as Ida Shires and Dorothy Wood, continuing after
the war (Shires and Wood 1927). Shires was a massage teacher and the
Painful bodies and brutal women: remedial massage, gender relations … 141
masseuse-in-charge of the Massage Department, Charing Cross Hospital,

and Wood was a Society examiner and lecturer at the Chelsea College of
Physical Education. In the United States, Louisa Lippitt, former chief aide
in physiotherapy, Medical Department, United States Army, and later cor-
rective exercise teacher at the University of Wisconsin, adapted her meth-
ods to treat soldiers for ‘normal therapeutic classes’ (Lippitt 1923).
By 1920, the Reconstruction Department of the United States Army
Medical Corps had treated 86,000 disabled men in the Physiotherapy,
Occupational Therapy and Curative Workshop Divisions (McMillan 1921:
9). Thus the war transformed physical therapy into an international
industry, enabling women such as Mary McMillan to move from Robert
Jones’s clinic in Liverpool, to become chief aide at Walter Reed Hospital
and eventually director of Reed College Training Clinic and supervisor of
aides for the US Army Medical Corps. Previously, decorum had not permitted
women to treat male bodies. However, the extensive orthopaedic needs of
military medicine in the First World War radically altered this.
Passive bodies and painful therapies

Working in orthopaedic centres or as part of the rehabilitation team, physical
therapists or reconstruction aides conducted manual remedial massage,
hydrotherapy (or hydrology – hot and cold water treatments) and electrother-
apy (increasing and decreasing electrical currents for rhythmic resistance –
faradism, galvanism and medical electricity). As well as heat and light
treatments (radiology and thermotherapy), electric cabinet baths (balneo-
therapeutics – the ‘science of bathing’) and medical climatology were used.
Therapists gave instruction in remedial and corrective exercises (medical
gymnastics), such as in the ‘Physio Therapy Department’ at Walter Reed
Army Medical Hospital, helping to set up the gymnasium and pool facilities.
At Heaton Park, Manchester, a special hydrotherapy and physiotherapy
installation was made at the Command Depot, servicing 5,000 troops, espe-
cially those ‘suffering from shock and disordered actions of the heart’. Men
who had been subjected to ‘strain and stress of an exceptional nature’ were
helped by the ‘sedative effect’ of thermal baths (Radcliffe 1916: 554).
Treatments aimed to relax muscles and minds before massage was conducted
upon painful limbs and scars. Hydrology could involve baths with tempera-
tures between 40 and 50 degrees C, ‘or as hot as can be conveniently borne’
(Fortescue Fox n.d.: 462). Although patients were not meant to suffer exces-
sive force or pain, the reality was that in many remedial treatments, the male
body endured degrees of pain at the hands of female physical therapists.
Medical photographs from Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital reveal
men’s bodies in a vulnerable state: whilst female therapists manipulated
joints, tested flexibility and stretched muscles, they also worked on very
sensitive amputation stumps (Figure 1). As men lay on their backs, women
used their bodily strength to massage backs, buttocks, upper thighs and
groin areas. They often inflicted pain by pulling and pushing limbs. In
many such images, the therapist massages the stump, which would have
been painful and perhaps humiliating. It is difficult to assess the expression
on the patient’s face as he looks to the ceiling; however, it does seem a sen-
sitive moment of physical contact. Women acting upon men’s arms could be
just as sensitive and potentially emasculating (Figure 2). After amputation,

Figure 1: Reconstruction Aide Massaging Patient’s Leg Stump, Walter Reed

Army Hospital Archives, Washington DC. Courtesy of the National Museum of
Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C.
Hitchcock and Angier Collection.
Figure 2: Reconstruction Aide Massaging Patient’s Arm, Walter Reed Army

Hospital Archives, Washington DC. Courtesy of the National Museum of Health
and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C. Hitchcock
and Angier Collection.
the arm often became weak and spindly, having suffered muscle wastage or
atrophy, exhibiting softness (hypotonus), lack of flexion, ‘diminution in vol-
ume’ and what was called ‘functional impotence’ (Fortescue Fox 1917: 81).
One soldier recalled a nurse ‘falling down laughing’ at his limb for being
‘the size of a child’s’ (Brewster 1917). Just as women expected men’s bodies
to be robust, so too did men expect women to be more sympathetic. In the
military hospital, embodied gender relations were often fraught. This was a
period in which the connection between muscles, masculinity and sexual
prowess was reiterated in both rehabilitation literature and popular body-
building (Carden-Coyne 2004). Reinforcing this were the concepts of active
and passive bodily movements that underpinned remedial massage. Men
and women felt these associations precisely because the therapy was physi-
cally intimate and the male body appeared frail in its pained state.
Therapists, using either their hands with massage and manipulation or
resistance machines, acted upon the male body in what were called ‘pas-
sive movements’. In stretching the shortened ligaments or breaking down
scar adhesions, the masseuse aimed to ‘restore the normal movement in
joints’ (Fortescue Fox and Campbell McClure 1916: 311). They also used
specially designed technologies – Zander machines, for example – or those
developed by private clinicians such as Dr Gustav Hamel in London, or at
the Edgar Allen Institute in Sheffield. Women too designed machines.
Olive Guthrie-Smith devised gymnastic equipment for wrist joints, the
treatment of flat feet, stiff ankles and elbow joints, as well as an apparatus
for passive arm stretches and shoulder abduction for injuries (Goodall-
Copestake 1920: 249). At Heaton Park, tailored systems of weights and
pulleys were installed for the flexion and extension of muscles and joints.
In the process of rehabilitation, a patient aimed to move from passive
treatments to active ones. Passing through transitional phases, the male
body was initially regarded as susceptible and acutely sensitized to pain.
The wounded man began as a passive body to be acted upon by physicians
and therapists. From manual treatment and manipulation, he came to
perform machine movements and then free ‘active movements’, with the
intention that the patient ‘must be thrown still more on his own resources
by free gymnastics in which there is no guidance from the machine or
operator’ (R.T. Mackenzie 1916: 218). Increasing the degree of difficulty
with tasks, passive manipulation, weights and machines often hurt.
Indeed, pain was a recognized part of the process of recovery through
endurance (Royal Society of Medicine 1916: 232). As a patient graduated
to gymnastic movement his fortitude and stamina was assessed, which, as
rehabilitation therapist R. Fortescue Fox stated, was ‘the final test for
active service in the field’ (Fortescue Fox 1917: 121).
Physical therapy was underpinned by a re-gendering process, by which
the male body was slowly reactivated and masculine self-control restored.
Force was to be moderated if ‘any trembling arises’ (Waddington 1917:
xi). According to the head of the Massage Department at Shepherd’s Bush
Military Orthopaedic Hospital, Dr James Mennell, ‘skilled gradation to
active movement’ was the key. Degenerate and dormant muscles had to be
‘enabled’ through a ‘recuperative course’ to a ‘revived power of sponta-
neous action’ (Mennell 1917: vii). Such actions indicated the restored
condition of masculinity.

Massage involved several forceful techniques. Effleurage (stroking)

was used in all painful conditions, sprains, fractures and adhesions.
Performed by the palm of the hand, the thumb and fingertips, it aimed to
increase circulation with increasing pressure and vigorous friction as ‘tol-
eration is established’. Petrissage involved kneading, pinching and grasp-
ing of the deeper tissues. Muscles were pressed against the underlying
bone by a ‘slow and deep’ pressure – firm ‘but not too painful’. Tapotement
or striking meant ‘beating’ the patient’s body with the open hand, as well
as ‘hacking’ by the masseuse’s ulnar bone. Fingertips were used as a
‘flail’ and the flat of the clenched knuckles. Masseuses were instructed
that ‘blows should be sharp and quick, but not heavy enough to bruise.
They should be short and snappy, and done from a loose wrist’ (R.T.
Mackenzie 1917: 89–91).
In wounded bodies, physical manipulation of joints and muscles or
massage of tender tissues and scar adhesions was painful. Although baths
were used to soften the body for flexion, there was danger here too. Wasted
muscles and damaged nerves often had severely diminished sensitivity, so
that ‘scalding of these areas may take place, without the patient having
complained of any discomfort in the normal portions of the limb’
(Fortescue Fox 1917: 26). Conversely, some found heat extremely painful
and massage was ‘rendered impossible’. Phantom pains in ‘the missing
hand or foot, so frequently felt after amputation’ further sensitized the
body (Fortescue Fox 1917: 28). The complexity of wounds meant that
swollen joints or inflamed tissues could be ‘either relieved or aggravated by
manipulation’ (Fortescue Fox and Campbell McClure 1916: 311). Patients
endured painful treatments before the limb improved and the pain sub-
sided. Experiencing, inflicting and bearing pain was understood as intrinsic
to the process of physical rehabilitation.
Although instructions alerted women to the issue of force and persis-
tent pain, masseuses were also instructed to be suspicious of the patient’s
pain response and to test whether it was genuine. Some pain was regarded
as imagined and psychological, rather than physiological. As surgeon
Major Robert Tait Mackenzie warned: ‘Some patients wince on the slightest
touch, and this false pain must be distinguished from real’ (R.T. Mackenzie
1917: 94; my emphasis). Diagnostic power gave women a further boost in
their professional identity. However, it was underpinned by distinctly
gendered assumptions about how men should respond to pain and how
women should police their behaviour. Therapists had to make judgements
about the patient and then determine the degree of physical force and
moral pressure to apply. These rules were often contradictory for, on the
one hand, she had to be careful with the male body, avoiding ‘quick and
jerky motions’ that made him ‘apprehensive’. On the other hand, she was
given free rein over his mental faculties: ‘suggestion, encouragement,
scolding or even bullying, all have their uses’. Although social intimacy
with the patient was to be avoided, masseuses were asked to ‘distract his
attention’ from the movement being administered (R.T. Mackenzie 1917:
94). Given these contradictions, it is not surprising that women’s
management of painful treatments became a fraught physical and emo-
tional issue, and one with professional consequences for women in military
medicine.
Brutal women and the gender politics of pain

Remedial masseuses had to adjust to male bodies with new rules socialized
around decorum, class and gender. Whereas in the nineteenth century a
female patient was necessarily ‘neurotic’, requiring the ‘delicate and sym-
pathetic touch’ that a ‘strong person’ lacked, now with the onset of war it
was commonly believed that the male patient required a firmer hand
(Ellison 1904: 3). With a female patient it was held that massage ‘should
never be painful to her’ [my emphasis]; with a male it was believed that the
pain endurance of the patient should be continually tested in order to
rehabilitate his wasted muscles and amputated limbs (Ellison 1904: 90).
Masseuse Margaret Palmer argued that, ‘as pain and tenderness grow less,
the strength of the treatment can be increased’ (Palmer 1918: 258). These
attitudes generated enormous controversy amongst both patients and the
medical profession. Masseuses were accused of being under the miscon-
ception that without pain, massage was merely ‘treatment by suggestion’
and that they should ‘give to the patient all he can stand’ (Mennell 1915:
755). Dr James Mennell pinpointed the problem as a matter of incorrect
training in massage school, where it was assumed that ‘pain and discom-
fort are inseparable from successful treatment’. Mennell was a respected
medical officer in the Physico-Therapeutic Department, St Thomas’s
Hospital, and a civilian medical officer in the Massage Department of
Shepherd’s Bush Military Orthopaedic Hospital, where he supervised 23
trained masseuses and 2 masseurs. Between 1916 and 1917 they treated
863 patients, and each week 1,680 treatments were given (W.C.
Mackenzie 1917: 677). Commenting on letters he received from patients
and families, Mennell declared ‘all is not as well as it might be’ with mas-
sage. According to one correspondent, ‘operators are unnecessarily vio-
lent’ and patients were evading treatment as a result (Mennell 1915:
755). Another physician noted that military patients ‘dread the visit’ of
the therapist with her ‘too rough methods’ (St Aubyn-Farrer 1915: 888).
As we shall see, patients’ representations of the massage therapist sup-
ported this view.
Concerned that some masseuses were applying too much force, result-
ing in physical and psychological damage, such as temporary hysterical
physiologies, James Mennell warned that ‘the dose of movement given
daily should be the maximum that does not cause more than a transitory
twinge’. Mennell appealed to masseuses that soldiers had ‘passed through
a time of superhuman fatigue and strain’, undergone operations and suf-
fered septic absorption. Treatment should be ‘devoid of pain’, even if it
meant recovery was slow (Mennell 1915: 755–56). Rarely witnessed in
military medicine, this remarkable sympathy was mobilized to expose the
industry’s failings.
Despite the professionalism of physical therapy, serious mistakes were
being made. Mass casualties necessitated that some untrained nurses,
VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachment workers) and orderlies were asked to
give patients massage. Indeed, Lena Hitchcock, an American occupational
therapist, recalled often having to massage men’s fragile limbs. Although
untrained, she had to apply Dakin solution to an ‘open ugly leg wound, I
felt the boy’s leg twitch horribly’ (Hitchcock n.d.: 47). In one scandalous
case at the British Red Cross Auxiliary Hospital for Officers, Brighton, a

soldier’s un-united shoulder fracture broke in the masseuse’s hands,

which led to an enquiry and several dismissals (Barclay 1994: 68).
Reports suggested some people were employed in hospitals after only
twelve lessons, and that ‘strange things were being done in the name of
massage’ (Mennell 1915: 755). Leading orthopaedic surgeon Robert Jones
was compelled to lecture on empathy, reminding of the patient’s plight
through the ‘shock of injury’, long periods of suppuration, and his
‘wearisome convalescence’ by massage, electricity and ‘monotonous
machines’, which ‘too often leaves him discontented with hospital life’
(Jones 1917: 514). Patients were depressed and, according to Mennell,
surgeons’ ‘good work’ was being ‘undone by injudicious’ treatment.
Misdiagnosis of the origin of pain, he thought, indicated lack of expertise.
Thus he warned that orthopaedics itself was in ‘jeopardy’ if ‘unnecessary
suffering’ was inflicted (Mennell 1915: 755).
Nevertheless there was inconsistency within the medical profession.
Massage in relation to the treatment of wounds was a trial-and-error pro-
cedure with uncertain results. Indeed, some physicians were ambiguous
about the degree of force to be applied. Whilst Mennell felt no pain should
be endured, Fortescue Fox stated that pain should not last more than
twenty minutes. Hasty and excessive treatments, however, could lead to
the nervous collapse of the patient (Fortescue Fox 1917: 126). Surgeon
Frank Romer stated that massage should be light in character if there was
pain, but firmer otherwise. Yet he also stated that whilst ‘joints blocked by
dense inflammatory products do not respond well to forcible manipula-
tion’, there were occasions when ‘in suitable cases of joint stiffness,
restoration of function is materially hastened’ by the use of force. He
acknowledged that a certain amount of controversy existed as to ‘whether
massage should be a painful process or not’. In his cases, massage ‘must
cause discomfort and occasionally pain from the nature of the disabilities
they have to overcome’. Concluding, he argued that the ‘gentle stroke’ and
effleurage ‘are merely a waste of time’. However, in the case of fractures,
sprains or synovitis, ‘anything in the nature of roughness must be avoided’
(Romer 1918: 435).
Controversy over remedial massage fed into political furore over the
Royal Army Medical Corps and its allied medical services (Whitehead
1999). Writing to The Lancet, one physician placed the massage scandal
within the realm of the ‘shared doubt whether our country is doing the
very best that our wounded soldiers deserve’ (Greenwood 1915: 888). It
also fuelled antagonism between female professionalism and male medical
authority. For some physicians, massage was a platform upon which to
call for the General Medical Council to displace the private schools run by
women and take over the examination process. Mennell recommended
that physicians should supervise: ‘no masseur or masseuse should be
allowed to work on his or her own’ (Mennell 1915: 757). Dr Greenwood,
a physician working in a military hospital, reiterated this point: ‘the idea
that massage is useless until it hurts is so general (even amongst medical
men, I fancy) that it is difficult to eradicate’. Pain endurance was so criti-
cal to the re-stabilizing of masculinity that patients too were convinced of
the merit of what Dr Greenwood called ‘brutal methods’ (Greenwood
1915: 888). Together, medical uncertainty and training inconsistencies
contributed to debate over massage, upon which some medical men

capitalized.
In the United States, women eventually gave up their therapeutic
authority over the disabled male body by only working under physicians.
In exercising what Surgeon General William Gorgas tellingly referred to as
women’s ‘powers of personal subordination’, therapists gained a privileged
professional network, which they reshaped as a congenial relation-
ship of ‘team play’ (Linker 2005a: 326). The American Physiotherapy
Association’s code of ethics is revealing, for in pledging an oath to the
state and to the medical professional, the patient was bypassed (Linker
2005a: 328). By contrast, in Britain there appears a reversal of this trend.
Women in British physical therapy had traditionally been subordinates.
However, they were increasingly vocal in defending against the critical
encroachment of the male medical profession.
Whilst in the United States male physicians dominated electrotherapy, in
Britain women surpassed the earlier model of marginal physicians working
in hospitals or clinics or nurses trained at the Institute for Medical Electricity,
London (Linker 2005a: 335; Morus 2006: 243; Uyeama 1997: 150). The
Incorporated Society of Trained Masseuses held the first examinations on
medical electricity in 1915, and remained the main institution where this
qualification could be acquired (Barclay 1994: 10). In 1917, physician and
neurologist at London Red Cross Hospital Edward Ash warned his fellow
‘medical men’ to keep ‘in touch’ with various electrotherapeutic measures.
For it would be ‘most unfortunate if these drift into the hands of unqualified
“medical electricians”’ (Ash 1917: 165). Although he was not explicitly
challenging the credentials of female masseuses, there was increasing com-
petition to the monopoly of the female-dominated Incorporated Society, such
as by the new British Institute of Massage and Remedial Gymnastics in
Manchester, a subsidiary of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, Ancoats
Hospital and Salford Royal Hospital (Fox 1915). The General Medical
Council and the General Council of Medical Education and Registration
eventually supported the rival Institute, objecting to the Incorporated
Society’s ‘somewhat arrogant attempt to claim a monopoly to which it has
no title, either in fact or in equity’ on training nurses and masseuses
(GCMER Acting Registrar 1916). The medical establishment persuaded the
Board of Trade to reject the Incorporated Society’s request for a hearing
(Board of Trade Minutes 1916). Roger Cooter has concluded that ‘physio-
therapists and allied professionals were in competition with orthopaedists for
control over patients’ (Cooter 1993: 135). Although medical electricity had
a history of ‘disciplining’ the body and nervous system, there were disputes
about measurements and orthodoxy, and it was not regarded as a speciality
(Morus 2006: 244). Now with women steering the industry, the notion of
expertise had a different currency of power sharing. Significantly, female dis-
ciplining had gendered consequences as fragile soldiers’ bodies offered a
unique moment in history for women entering the masculinist sphere of the
military hospital.
Competition from large rival organizations also saw the advocacy of
precise therapeutic machines over unreliable manual skills. Medical
modernity and its fashion for prosthetic appliances saw influences from
European rehabilitation centres spread to Britain (The Lancet 1916: 880;

1917a: 425). Electric vibration and mechanical apparatuses with cords,

weights and pulleys were being favoured. Mounting a defence of massage
and women’s expertise, Dr Florence Barrie Lambert, inspecting officer of
massage and electrical departments attached to the command depots and
convalescent camps of the armed forces, wrote to The Lancet in 1916.
Lambert reminded readers of the important work being done in British
camps, such as Epsom Village (4,000 men), Dartford (1,200 men),
Blackpool (2,113 men), Alnwick (2,080 men) and Eastbourne (3,000
men). Massage was part of a ‘thoroughgoing system’; masseuses were
‘skilled electricians’. Still, Lambert concluded, ‘passive mechanical exercise
can never give the same results as good manual work’ (Lambert 1916a:
790). Lambert’s article received a condescending response from a fellow
physician, regarding ‘her own special views’, and patronizing reactions
from Campbell McClure (MD, honorary secretary with Dr R. Fortescue
Fox, Balneology and Climatology Committee, Royal Society for Medicine)
and Septimus Sunderland (chairman of the Royal Society for Medicine),
who felt a ‘duty to correct’ her assumption that machines were favoured
over manual work. Lambert countered in a subsequent issue of The Lancet,
arguing that manual manipulation was the only way to avoid injury. In
retorting, Lambert claimed her experiential authority over the male med-
ical correspondents. Not only was she a physician and a physical therapist,
she had actually attended Gustav Zander’s mechanical therapy clinic in
Stockholm, unlike any of her critics (Lambert 1916b: 879).
Despite medical controversy over women’s expertise and patient treat-
ment, a shift was occurring. Whilst in the nineteenth century, the British
massage therapist was ordered to follow the ‘strict directions’ of a doctor,
and to have ‘absolute loyalty and obedience’ to him, now she was claiming
her own expert knowledge (Despard 1911: 1). Women practitioners and
teachers continued to publish textbooks and manuals, such as Beatrice
Goodall-Copestake, an examiner for the Society, massage teacher and
nurse at London Hospital. Society therapists also created their own Journal
of the Incorporated Society of Trained Masseuses, and published the findings of
both male and female practitioners within military and civil medicine
(Shires and Wood 1927; Lippitt 1923: vi). Nevertheless, military medicine
preferred the view that the passive treatment of massage could never
replace the active patient: ‘massage must always be looked upon as second
best’ (The Lancet 1917b: 158).
Representation, intimacy and agency: peppy professionals

or female tormentors?
At the same time as British women defended their control of the industry,
warding off attacks on their professionalism, practitioners defined themselves
by their strong and active bodies. Female masseuses asserted their profes-
sional identity based, as Beth Linker states, on ‘strength and science’ (Linker
2005b: 105). Physiotherapists characterized themselves as women of force
and energy. One aide wrote a poem, ‘Fizzy’s Song’ (as in Fizzy’O, slang for
physiotherapist), in which she described her fellow therapists as exhibiting
strength and energy: ‘Oh we are full of pep, pep, pep/With our muscles just as
strong as steel/[...] Just think how good we feel’ (WRAMH 1918). Muscular
therapists claimed their own personal benefit in possessing physical power
Figure 3: Hospital Games with Reconstruction Aides. Walter Reed Army Hospital Archives, Washington
DC. Courtesy of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,
Washington, D.C. Hitchcock and Angier Collection.
over men. They also felt their strength helped them transform men through
the pain process. As one aide poet told her patients: ‘You’ll be strong when we
get through and that’s about all one aide can do. FEEL MY BICEPS!’
(WRAMH ‘The Masseuse’). Massage was recognized as uniquely binding the
patient and practitioner through this bodily inter-dynamic. Whilst ‘recon-
struction aides’ claimed professionalism as therapeutic experts, they also
engaged in hospital sports and competitions. Walter Reed Army Hospital
archives contain photographs of aides straining in ‘tug of war’, a spectacle for
patients and staff (Figure 3). Such demonstrations reinforced perceptions of
women’s physical strength – a counterpoint to the feminized image of the
wounded soldier. So empowered was the therapist, she was able to joke about
the pain she could inflict. In the poem ‘The Masseuse’, she is described as
having hot hands ‘she can’t control’, and that her sharp nails pinched the
skin of the patient. The aide poet admits: ‘The patients all begin to
cringe/When they see her coming in/Like April rain, she makes the pain/Just
seem to grow and everything’ (WRAMH ‘The Masseuse’).
Male patients reinforced this view of physiotherapists’ physical power,
depicting women as perpetrators of pain upon their frail bodies. Patient
poems and cartoons published in hospital magazines often target massage
and the female masseuse. Comic relief and dark humour highlight the expe-
rience of pain for the male patient recovering from amputation. Affirming

medical and social perceptions about the wounded body, patients internal-
ized this view of passivity and pictured themselves as weak, child-like or at
the mercy of strong women. Field ambulance journal The Lead Swinger con-
tained a fake advertisement section, which professed, ‘Come and Have Your
Leg Pulled. And Don’t Forget TRENCH FEET [...] Nice Young Masseurs’ (The
Lead Swinger 1915: 21). In another poem, a patient refers to men hating the
gymnasium where they undertook rehabilitation exercises. Patients might
believe that therapy was good for them, and yet this rhyme focuses on pain
and avoidance, a reality that physicians were concerned about, as mentioned
earlier in James Mennell’s comments. For Lance Corporal H. Ridgewell at
Summerdown Camp, the pain was certainly not worth the gain:
G’s for the Gyms which we love (I don’t think).

Tho’ sometimes they’re useful to straighten a kink [...]
M’s for the Massage that cures the lame,
But we’d rather not try the treatment again.
(Ridgewell 1917: 2)
Military physicians observed that some patients embraced the pain in the
belief that they were hastening their recovery or that by enduring a physical
ordeal their masculinity would be reconstituted.
To be sure, discipline in the military was normalized. As Beth Linker
points out, ‘physiotherapists resembled drill sergeants more than bedside
nurturers’ (Linker 2005a: 330). Depictions reveal men’s fear of the
masseuse. In one cartoon by a patient, who appears to have no arms, an
over-zealous nurse lurches towards him. The patient is terrified with his
hair standing on end. The caption reads: ‘I don’t want to be massaged!!!’
In another by the same patient artist (C. Coven), a nurse yanks an armless
soldier out of bed by the leg, and he appears to be yelling in pain, terrified
at the prospect of ‘More Massage’ (Figure 4). Confronted with new forms
of medical authority in the form of women inflicting humiliation and pain,
wounded soldiers tried to reclaim their dignity. Cartoons and poems were
an important cultural device by which patients could assert their agency,
even whilst accepting pain as a fact of life.
Significantly, the mediation of pain was a point of humour repeated in the
industry’s official journal of the Incorporated Society. One popular anecdote
depicted ‘an occasional shout from a patient who remonstrated at a strong
current’ of electricity, and a sergeant exclaiming: ‘If the Kaiser saw this he
might say – “The English Army is being tortured to make it to the front”’
(cited in Barclay 1994: 62; my emphasis). Pain and gender role reversal was
accepted in the social and medical space of the military hospital. Humorous
representations were part of a social dialogue between patients and staff.
Cultural exchanges were a coping strategy for bodily suffering, underscored
by the mediation of class and gender relations in the military hospital.
Bodily pain required sensitive arrangements and procedures. Massage on
sensitive stumps, buttocks and groin areas could be embarrassing. On a
healing stump, patient and therapist had to negotiate the boundaries of pain.
In one camp journal, it was written, ‘D is for Drill only Swedish [massage] it’s
true. But cripples don’t find it easy to do [...] N is for Nurse gently rubbing
the place. With it’s got to be done look on her face.’ (Blue Boys’ Alphabet
Figure 4: C. Coven, ‘I don’t want to be massaged’ and ‘More Massage’, First

Eastern General Hospital Gazette, vol. 1, no. 19, December 21, 1915, p.
399. Courtesy of RAMC Collection, Wellcome Trust, London.
1917: 3) In contrast to the male culture of the military hospital, masseuses

had been familiar with female bodies. Male bodies posed problems of social
propriety, and hence the Society worked hard to protect its medical reputa-
tion. The role of respectable women and qualified nurses in conjunction with

mainstream medicine helped to situate the profession as an allied medical

service, and dissociate it from sexuality and prostitution. The need to discon-
nect immoral allusions was built into the Society’s code of ethics with the pro-
viso that: ‘General massage for men who are not really ill is not allowed to
members of the Society.’ Such was the awareness of the potential of sexual
misadventure, that women were told the ‘reasons for these rules are
obvious and only by adherence to them can certain dangers be avoided’
(Goodall-Copestake 1920: 4; my emphasis). However, one aide’s poem
reveals not only the likelihood of sexual attraction between men and women
in the wards, but also that professional codes could be taken rather lightly:
I’ll promise that I’ll not flirt at all

Or even wink an eye
My relationships will be business-like
The office I’ll not see
And I’ll look so modest like
When a Sergeant looks at me
(WRAMH ‘The Masseuse’)
Significantly, whilst women asserted their scientific and ‘business-like’

approach in their professional rhetoric, as Beth Linker has argued, when
we examine the cultural work produced by masseuses a more complex
picture arises of the gender and sexuality dynamics being played out
within military hospitals.
Certainly, the sexualization of masseuses posed challenges for the
propriety of remedial massage. Given that most young women had had
few physical experiences with male bodies, the First World War had
brought new interactions with men and with male body parts as never
before. Massage highlighted these potentially awkward and complex physical
and social interactions, and the negotiation of ‘topsy-turvy’ class and gender
relations (Doan 2006). Patients were not alone in this awareness.
Practitioners too realized that massage could be both painful and sensuous.
As Fizzy’s Song declared: ‘Massage with a slip, slip, slip/When your hands
move just as smooth as mine/Tapotement with a flip, flip, flip/Oh we’re
surely doing fine’. Indeed, Dr Greenwood’s preference for the London
School of Massage, which rejected ‘brutal methods’ in favour of ‘the loving
lingering stroke’, suggests official approval of ‘medical touching’ as a sensual
treatment (Greenwood 1915: 888).
As women exerted degrees of gender and physical power, men
responded creatively. Within the gendered social space of the military
hospital, frailty and pain enabled counteractive cultures in the wards.
Bodily intimacy and vulnerability were managed by the men through
humour, which represented the masseuse as a sexual object or as sexually
knowledgeable. Reviewing a well-regarded massage manual, the editor of
one hospital gazette wrote cheekily: ‘Methuens – the publishers – are
advertising a new book entitled: What Every Masseuse Should Know.
Comfortable Grasps for Joint Movements. It is our idea that in some establish-
ments patronized by our gallant wounded these “comfortable grasps” are
well understood’ (‘Camp Fires’ 1918: 1). The pun suggests that patients
noted – even read – massage manuals of the day, and perhaps tried to gain
professional knowledge about their treatments. Sexual allusion, however,

was never far from the imagination.
Patient poems could be quite explicit, indicating that firm manipulations
were arousing and even sado-masochistic. In ‘A Painful Parody’, the patient
poet dreams of the pleasurable pain of brutal punching and pummelling.
Resembling the sexual pull (‘rapture’) of bondage games, he now dreams of
torture instruments, imagining another patient’s delighted ‘squirming’:
Pale Hands which rubbed

Inside the Massage Hut
Where are you now?
Who squirms beneath your touch?
Do you recall my face with rapture fled
Those limping days before I shed my crutch?
Pale hands I loved
Beneath the massage roof
Whom do you punch and pummel ‘stead of me?
I have had dreams of thumbscrews and the rack
Since that first day you kneaded on my knee
And yet pale ministering hands – on looking back
How much I needed thee!
(‘A Painful Parody’ 1918: 2)
Sexualizing both the masseuse and the treatment was one way of dealing
with the embarrassment of physical closeness and the crossing of gender
boundaries around the perceived passive male body.
Writing his ‘Reminiscences’ of massage at Brookshill Convalescent
Home, Captain C.B. Phillips depicted a sexual fantasy: ‘The Queen of
Hearts has given me/Five grains of her Quinine/With camphorated olive
oil/Rubbed ‘well’ my chest has been’. In this ode to his masseuse, he
implies that her ‘rare beauty’ and the force upon his body elicited ‘unworthy
thoughts’ of pain and pleasure:
She rubs you gently just at first

And then you say: ‘How nice!’
But by the time the flips begin
You’ve started thinking twice
In spite of this unworthy thought
Which passes through one’s brain
It does ‘the place’ a world of good
And cures it of all pain.
Experiencing both pleasure and pain clearly affected gender and sexual
relations, but also positioned the therapist as having medical authority
over the male body. As Captain Phillips continued: ‘And when the smacks
like rain descend/You wish you’d never never/Allowed yourself within the
power/Of a lady quite so clever’ (Blackwell 1918; my emphasis).
Men attempted to subvert these anxious encounters with sexual mythology.
Narratives might project a desire that the masseuse be sexually alluring:
‘“Do have a look at my ankle, and tell me what you think of it?” said the

Massage lady to the RAMC officer, who blushed! [...] But alas she was refer-
ring to the ankle of a patient in her charge!’ Elsewhere, a patient writes a
poem from the voice of the masseuse whose modesty is feigned: ‘If I should
tell you that my legs/Are really worth attention/You must not think that
I refer/To things I should not mention.’ The final interjection reinforces the
titillation of potential sexual arousal in the Massage Department: ‘We have
no intention of submitting it to the censor!’ (‘Camp Fires’ 1917: 1).
Sexualization of the therapist was a reaction to the patient’s pain
response, his internalized passivity and medical subordination. Whilst in
some narratives, men refer to masseuses as ‘ladies’, at other times they use
professional titles, stating comically that ‘masseuses [...] is shorter than
assistant tormentors’ (‘Camp Fires’ 1917: 1). Medical gymnastics were
referred to as ‘Physical Jerks’, implying adverse pulling of joints and muscles,
and revealing animosity towards rough masseurs and orderlies. One
trainee aide confirmed this in her poem: ‘From room to room did she sadly
roam/She watched ’em rub and she watched ’em yank/But when she had
to do it, Lord, how her heart sank’ (WRAMH ‘Songs of the Summer
Aides’). Pain forced upon patients featured as a warning for newcomers to
Summerdown Convalescent Camp from patient Franklin Thompson of the
8th East Lancashire Regiment:
Woe unto him that be on Massage, for an awful fate awaits him. He shall be
commanded to lay in a bed under much heat, there to be roasted, after
which a strong sister shall approach him and grasp him by the leg, and after
much twisting, pulling and bending, she will start to pummel with her fist.
(Thompson 1917: 3)
Admitting physical vulnerability, experiencing intimate and awkward

treatments and attempting to contain pain was dealt with by humour.
This was a typical response of young men under pressure from the exacting
physical and emotional cost of mechanized warfare. Comic representation
of the passive male body was a direct result of the gender politics of the
military hospital and the close contact that men had with female practi-
tioners, who were at once burgeoning professionals but also women without
the status of physician or nursing sister.
Contact between female and male bodies was an anxious encounter that
generated cultural forms of agency in the self-representations of patients and
practitioners, but also in their representations of each other. This dynamic
reflected the gendered negotiation of intimacy around the wounded male
body but also the gendered structure of pain response. The value of this cul-
tural work is in revealing the complexity of institutional life and the dynamic
interrelation of male and female experiences in the ‘culture of the wards’.
Finally, whilst military medicine identified the wounded male body as passive –
and whilst the presence of women acting on men’s bodies reinforced the
image of the active female body – there were advantages to this inversion of
norms. Military medicine propagated the view of the hospital as a safe
haven, despite men’s considerable experiences of pain during treatment. Yet
being cured also meant a return to the dangers of the front line. Patients’
self-representation as passive bodies may have been a mode of empowerment
more than frailty. Thus bodily intimacy around pain and recovery generated
cultural responses where patients found cultural agency through sexual fan-
tasy and rewriting the body in pain as a story of passive pleasures.
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Contributor details
Ana Carden-Coyne is Lecturer in War and Conflict Studies, Centre for the Cultural
History of War, University of Manchester, and co-founder of the Disability History
Group, UK. She has published on the cultural history of the body, war and sexuality,
gender and commemoration. She co-edited Cultures of the Abdomen: A History of Diet,
Digestion and Fat in the Modern World (with Christopher E. Forth, Palgrave, 2005),
and a special edition of European Review of History entitled ‘Enabling the Past: New
Perspectives in the History of Disability’ with Julie Anderson (2007), and has a
forthcoming monograph Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First
World War to be published by Oxford University Press. Her current project is ‘Men in
Pain: Injury, Disability, Masculine Subjectivities in War’. Contact: Dr Ana Carden-
Coyne, Centre for the Cultural History of War, School of Arts, Histories and
Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
E-mail: a.cc@manchester.ac.uk

JWCS_1.2_04_art_Hurcombe.qxd 2/28/08 4:37 PM Page 159
Raising the dead: visual representations

of the combatant’s body in interwar
France
Martin Hurcombe University of Bristol
Abstract Keywords
During the interwar years, images of dead infantrymen rising from the grave J’Accuse
were designed as a reminder to the French nation of the suffering and sacrifice of Abel Gance
the armed forces and of the Army in particular during the war and of the debt Les Croix de bois
that the civilian population owed to its dead. Examining three French films of the Verdun
interwar years and the battlefield memorials of Verdun, this article studies the First World War
passage from a carnivalesque and subversive use of the grotesque to images that war veterans
suggest the redemptive value of sacrifice through the equation of the infantry-
man’s suffering with that of Christ. In both cases, the wounded or decaying body
of the soldier is central to articulating, asserting and consolidating war veterans’
claims for both moral and political authority in the post-war era.
French losses during the First World War are estimated to total nearly 1.4 1. In the United
million, the majority of these being young men between the ages of 18 and Kingdom, for
example, this
30. It is therefore assumed that most, if not all, French families lost at least expressed itself
one male member of their direct family (Fortescue 2000: 136–38). As Jay through the
Winter (1995) has shown, Europeans in general needed to find ways of popularity of
post-war séances.
mediating the immensity of their grief. In some cases, Winter notes, com- See Winter
memoration took the form of an attempt to communicate with the dead by (1995: chapter 3).
calling them forth from beyond the grave.1 The aim of this article is to
examine one particular phenomenon in post-war French culture: the rais-
ing of the dead combatant in French war films and those battlefield war
memorials erected in the interwar years to commemorate the French
Army’s bloodiest battle, Verdun. These images either represent the return of
the dead in unambiguous visual terms or suggest the return of the dead by
oblique reference. As we shall, see, in many cases, the wounded, decaying
or decayed body, reflecting the physical effect of war directly upon the body
itself, is central to the effect such images have upon the viewing public.
The return of the dead is, in the Freudian sense of the term, an
uncanny event; it is the return of those at once familiar to us, but now
made unfamiliar by their transformation in death (Freud 1955: 220).
Some of these images, however, are more fundamentally disturbing; in
their depiction of the decaying corpse that has returned to life, exposing
its wound to the public gaze, they become grotesque. Moreover, in many
cases, these dead have not returned to reassure the living, but to unsettle
and to challenge them. The original example of this, and therefore our

2. Roland Dorgelès also starting point, is Abel Gance’s acclaimed silent film J’Accuse/I Accuse
uses this device in his (1919) where, at the film’s end, the war dead rise up from their graves and
1923 novel Le Réveil
des morts, Paris: Albin march on a French village to see if their sacrifice has been worthwhile.
Michel. Gance’s striking depiction of the return of the war dead becomes a visual
3. Prost (1977b: 144) motif repeated in a number of battlefield war memorials in the Verdun
argues that war, area and in Raymond Bernard’s film Les Croix de bois/Wooden Crosses (1932).2
whilst rejected as an In these subsequent echoes of Gance’s film, however, the accusation of
essential human
experience by French the original return, bound up in the grotesque, becomes increasingly a
veterans’ secondary feature as the dead are used to suggest an intimate relationship
organizations, is between surviving war veterans and the dead alongside whom they
considered by these
to have bestowed a fought. Here the horror of suffering is increasingly part of a metaphor of
certain moral redemptive sacrifice that suggests the debt owed to the war dead and, by
authority upon association, to French veterans. I will examine this passage from the
veterans that allows
them to see beyond accusatory grotesque to the metaphor of redemptive sacrifice in the sec-
the interests and ond part of this study before returning to Gance’s second version of
intrigues of J’Accuse released in 1938. Whilst differing substantially from the original,
individual parties.
this version also concludes with the war dead rising from the grave, this
time to prevent the outbreak of a second world war by revealing the
physical horrors they endured during the First World War.
It is my contention that such images can be understood as expressions
of French war veterans’ claims of moral authority born of the combatant
experience. Moreover, the shifting relationship between the accusatory
grotesque and the theme of redemptive sacrifice in these images needs to
be understood not only in relation to claims of moral authority, but also to
veterans’ growing political ambitions during the interwar years since, as
Antoine Prost demonstrates, veterans’ dissatisfaction with the politics of
the Third Republic in France is often coupled with moral criticism of the
regime.3 The accusatory grotesque, this article will argue, predicated upon
the revelation of the wounded, rotting body, suggests a desire to subvert
the status quo and to overturn dominant social forces in civil society in
order to accord the combatant just reward and influence for the suffering
he has endured. The theme of redemptive sacrifice, whilst also emphasiz-
ing the physical suffering of the combatant, suggests the continued debt
owed to the war generation as a whole. Yet it also constitutes an attempt
to consolidate the status and influence attained by that generation in the
late 1920s and early 1930s through the assertion of this moral authority.
Both use the figure of the dead combatant as a means to their different
ends. The return of the accusatory grotesque in Gance’s 1938 version of
J’Accuse, I will argue, reveals that this influence has waned, that the war
generation feels once again marginalized and ignored by a nation heading
towards another war. These images, unlike many of those produced dur-
ing the war itself that suggested, as Huss (2004: 54) argues, the intergen-
erational ties that bound the combatant to society and the nation, suggest
an intergenerational conflict experienced by French war veterans as they
try to exact the debt owed to them by non-combatant society.
First awakenings: J’Accuse (1919)

J’Accuse ought not to be a film that subverts. Gance himself was no war
veteran, but spent much of the war working in the Ministry of Defence’s
film unit. Filmed in 1918, it was partly supported by the Army, which
160 Martin Hurcombe

intended to use it as propaganda, and many of its extras were serving 4. For James Welsh and
soldiers. Moreover, the film begins as a melodrama, focusing on the love Stephen Kramer
(1978: 67), the film is
triangle between the poet Jean Diaz (played by Romuald Joubé), his lover politically ambiguous,
Edith and François, her brutish husband whose mobilization in August combining ‘pacifism,
1914 allows Edith and Jean’s illicit affair to blossom. One month later Jean Wilsonian idealism,
and a certain
too is mobilized and appointed lieutenant in François’s regiment. The war amount of French
becomes a duel between the two men until they are reconciled through nationalism’.
combat and the news that Edith, who had been sent to stay with
François’s family in the Ardennes, is trapped in occupied territory where
she has been raped by a German soldier whose child she now carries.
The film’s depiction of war plays on French patriotic stereotypes that
sometimes borrow from French atrocity propaganda of the period; Edith’s
rapist is shown in flashback as an oversized, helmeted shadow looming
over his cowering victim. Battle sequences make visual references to
the French Revolution and at one point we see the ghostly figure of
Vercingétorix, ancient king of the Gauls, urging French troops forward
into battle.
In the course of the film, Jean periodically levels the accusation of the
film’s title. However, the recipient of this accusation and consequently the
nature of the accusation itself shift throughout the film. Jean’s first two
accusations seem levelled at the Germans who are held responsible for the
war and for the capture and rape of Edith. Subsequently, however, he
accuses the war itself for the destruction it has brought about and ulti-
mately the sun for looking down on such suffering with indifference.
Towards the end of the film, as Jean calls the villagers together, he accuses
individual villagers of infidelity towards the dead, of profiteering and of
other betrayals – accusations often levelled at civilians by French soldiers
at the front.
The film’s intent correspondingly slips from one of propagandist sup-
port for the war to a questioning of the war’s value and a highlighting of
the chasm that exists between combatants and civilian society. It increas-
ingly reveals an unstable ideological meaning through what Comolli and
Narboni (1994: 45) identify elsewhere as ‘a noticeable gap, a dislocation,
between the starting point and the finished product, [throwing] up obsta-
cles in the way of ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course’.4 The
raising of the dead is pivotal in this process. Jean’s accusations levelled at
the villagers are part of a mission he takes upon himself after François’s
death in a battle where both men set out to avenge Edith. Both are seri-
ously injured in the course of battle and are placed side by side in hospital.
As François dies the camera closes in on his dying gesture, which is to
clench Jean’s limp hand in his own, a gesture which emphasizes not only
the fraternity that now exists between the two soldiers, but also the indis-
soluble bond between Jean and the war dead, indissoluble to the extent
that the doctor is unable to separate their hands.
Shortly after, Jean returns home half delirious and summons the vil-
lagers to Edith’s house. That night the French war dead rise up. The
crosses of a front-line graveyard gradually transform before the viewer
into the decaying corpses of the dead raised from the ground by the
injunction ‘Let’s see if these deaths have served some purpose’. The dead
then limp towards their homes, arms outstretched. Back at Edith’s house,
Raising the dead: visual representations of the combatant’s body in interwar France 161
5. As Robert Smith Jean levels his accusations of civilian treachery while decaying corpses
(quoted by Royle) besiege the assembled villagers. Only once the villagers repent of their
suggests of silent
cinema more crimes do the dead limp back to their graves.
generally: ‘Early The dead of J’Accuse are part of a grotesque treatment of war that coa-
viewers of film were lesces with, and overshadows, those patriotic and propagandist elements
amazed and moved by
this miraculous gift already mentioned. This is reflected in the motif of the danse macabre; the
dispensed by film, that jubilation that some of the villagers feel at the declaration of war and the
of reanimating what singing of the Marseillaise thus fade into a shot of skeletons dancing in a
had gone […] Like
Christ calling Lazarus, circle. The same shot recurs at various other points in the film: as old men
film seemed to bring plant flags in a military map, transposed onto a close-up of a stained glass
back to life what had window in a church near the front, and as Jean reads his poem Les
been irrevocably
lost; it blurred Pacifiques (The Peaceful) to his dying mother.
uncannily the This grotesque treatment culminates, of course, in the return of the
distinction between war dead. Gance’s dead are not shy in displaying their wounds; some are
life and death’
(Royle 2003: 76). missing limbs, their bandages are blood-spattered and trail in the dirt.
Through this display of the wound, Gance is employing the grotesque in
order to subvert since, as Frances Connelly (2003: 2) argues, the
grotesque draws its strength from its opposition to convention and the
ideal. Like the skeletons of the danse macabre, the dead combatant serves to
question uncomplicated patriotic discourses concerning the war and to
unsettle the viewer as much as they unsettle the villagers of the film. This
return of the dead is unsettling in that, like the fantastic for Tzvetan
Todorov (1970: 29) or the uncanny for Nicolas Royle (2003: 1), it causes
a moment of hesitation between a rational or natural explanation of a
phenomenon and a supernatural one. In this moment of uncertainty, the
witness to the return of the dead wavers and an unsettling space is cre-
ated. We see this in the film’s characters, but a similar effect can also be
imagined in the film’s original, still grieving audiences.5
Like the grotesque of Bakhtin’s carnival, Gance’s grotesque depiction
of the combatant’s body, his revelation of the body’s capacity to be
wounded, to fail and to rot as a result of combat, constitutes a rejection of
loftier discourses that seek to sublimate human activity, to elevate it to
realms beyond the earthly and the here-and-now (Bakhtin 1968: 19).
However, like the grotesque body of Bakhtinian carnival, Gance’s
grotesque dead return not just to remind the viewer of the physical reality
of the body, but to suggest the potential for change. The grotesque body in
Bakhtinian carnival is political; its vast protuberances suggest an absence
of boundaries and infinite possibilities; it acts ‘on the confines of the body
and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and the new body’
(Bakhtin 1968: 317). The grotesque therefore constitutes part of the car-
nivalesque process. For Bakhtin, the carnival was a time when the existing
hierarchy was not so much suspended, but overthrown; it was a world
turned on its head, where fools were crowned kings and Church and State
ridiculed.
The raising of the dead in J’Accuse achieves a similar carnivalesque
effect. As the dead rise up from their graves, the screen splits into two. On
the bottom half of the screen, we watch the official victory parade held on
the Champs Elysées. On the top half of the screen we witness the dead,
played by serving soldiers, rising out of their graves. The patriotic dis-
course of victory-day celebrations is relegated to the bottom of the screen
162 Martin Hurcombe

to make way for the dead and their more pressing need to know if their
sacrifice was worthwhile, a demand levelled as much at the audience as at
the film’s civilian characters. It is this section of the film, Winter (1995:
133) argues, that betrays the influence of the combatant, French veterans
and, in particular, of Gance’s collaborator, the wounded veteran and poet
Blaise Cendrars.
Yet, as Connelly argues, the use of the grotesque betrays a position of
marginality. For a long time, the grotesque was an art form that existed liter-
ally in the margins, illustrating loftier, more authoritative texts. Grotesque
art therefore continues to reveal a struggle on the ‘boundaries, transgress-
ing, merging, overflowing, destabilising them’ (Connelly 2003: 4). This mar-
ginality reflects that felt by many returning veterans in the course of 1919,
often unable to find work and thereby to reintegrate immediately into civil-
ian life, but equally unable, as Prost (1977a: 94) notes, to form a single, uni-
fied veterans’ movement capable of exerting due influence on the political
and economic life of the nation. Gance’s use of the grotesque therefore
serves as an incursion across the borders of the status quo.
Yet the Bakhtinian carnival’s power to usurp lies in the laughter it
causes. Gance’s use of the grotesque and of the carnivalesque is more lim-
ited; the only laughter of J’Accuse is the deranged laughter of Jean Diaz
after he returns from war, more akin to the infernal laughter that Bakhtin
perceives in the Romantics’ use of the grotesque than to the healthy,
regenerative laughter of carnival to be found predominantly in the work of
Rabelais (Bakhtin 1968: 38). Moreover, while Gance’s use of the dead has
a potentially subversive effect, his constant confusion of modes, genres
and symbols prevents us from reading the film purely as subversive. While
the non-combatant viewer in 1919 is charged, like the film’s villagers,
with justifying his or her activities during the war, the dead return to the
grave and their threat recedes. Gance’s dead turn around, carrying their
own crosses into the distance, and return to their graves, but the image
constitutes a warning to the viewer: appeased for now, the dead may once
again return.
The scene closes with the shot of a single cross silhouetted against the
skyline. As Winter (1995: 136) argues, the tone here is predominantly
one of redemption; it is still possible for the viewing public to justify the
cost of the conflict in their future conduct. This expression of redemp-
tion, of a sacrifice worth its great cost, is bound up in the symbol of the
crucifix; a parallel is therefore established between the sacrifice and suf-
fering of the war dead and the combatant generation more generally, and
that of Christ.
J’Accuse establishes the visual lexicon upon which subsequent represen-
tations of the returning war dead will draw, creating an indissoluble tie
between the dead, their sacrifice and veterans who, like Jean Diaz, become
vessels for the dead charged with their moral authority. Furthermore,
through a dualistic representation of the dead combatant, which is
grotesque yet hints at redemption through the theme of selfless sacrifice
symbolized by the cross and an equation of the dead combatant with
Christ’s suffering, it combines the subversive pacifism of the former with the
patriotic concept of redemptive sacrifice, the notion that they died that we,
the nation, might live.
6. The monument Intermission (1922–35)

dedicated to the fallen
defenders of Côte
This period, as Prost (1977a) notes, sees the gradual ascendancy of the
304, for example, war veterans to positions of power and influence in both local and
clearly indicates in an national political life. However, despite attempts to unite the many and
inscription that it was
erected by survivors
diverse veterans’ movements into a national body in the early 1920s, it
of the various was not until 1927 and, ultimately, until the creation of a national
divisions who fought umbrella organization, the Confédération générale, that such a body
there, funded by
public subscription
existed. The unity and national profile afforded by the Confédération
and conceived and générale enabled veterans’ movements to lobby for and attain improved
managed by a war pensions at the end of the 1920s, an issue about which veterans were
committee of veterans
representing each
increasingly consulted by the governments of the early 1930s. In 1930
division chaired by André Tardieu, a war veteran, was appointed prime minister. Such influ-
Maréchal Philippe ence encouraged some movements to consider issues beyond the immedi-
Pétain.
ate material concerns of their members. Many therefore began to develop
a conception of the veteran’s civic duty in the field of social and political
reform whilst also extending the remit of their internal and public debates
to include foreign affairs. It is this desire to influence the course of politi-
cal life that informs veterans’ participation in the anti-parliamentary riots
of 6 February 1934, according to Prost (1977a: 157).
As there is no immediate threat of war throughout this period, the
subversive pacifism denoted by Gance’s grotesque gradually recedes in rep-
resentations of the dead combatant, and these come to emphasize the
moral authority born of the latter’s redemptive sacrifice. The spectre of
the dead combatant remains a device that is periodically raised before the
eyes of the French public to remind it of the combatant generation’s moral
authority, simultaneously serving to consolidate veterans’ influence and to
make further claims for it. This is the case with Raymond Bertrand’s film
Les Croix de bois, but also with a number of battlefield monuments, particu-
larly in the Verdun area, which will serve as a case study here.
Whilst village and town war memorials have become the subject of
much research, battlefield memorials have escaped much individual acad-
emic attention or have been considered alongside the former. A distinction
does need to be made between the two, however, since, as Prost’s detailed
study of the memorialization process in towns and villages reveals, these
monuments often reflected ideological tensions between different local
groups of which veterans were only one (Prost 1977b: 39–40). Battlefield
memorials were constructed to remember the dead of specific divisions
with the support of surviving veterans. These veterans, in addition to
managing the public subscriptions often used to raise funds for its con-
struction, also established committees that decided on the monument’s
design.6 Battlefield memorials therefore allow us to perceive a vision of the
dead informed by the veterans’ own understanding of the sacrifice their
generation made.
These monuments are diverse in appearance. The monument dedicated
to the fallen of Côte 304 is a simple, but lofty pyramidal stele surmounted
by a sculpted cross. The monument du squelette, as it is known locally, near
Argonne (Figure 1) is more complex, depicting a rotting corpse rising up
from the broken soil at its feet. The monument at Vauquois (Figure 2) takes
the form of a tower (it is only at the rear of the tower that we see two
sculpted infantrymen). Maxime Réal del Sarte’s monument to the dead of
164 Martin Hurcombe

Figure 1: Le monument du squelette. Sculptor: J. Froment-Meurice. Inaugurated 10 September 1922.

Photograph by the author.
the 106th regiment at Les Éparges (Figure 3) is perhaps the most complex
with its dreaming head and skeletal hands. All these monuments are
located in a similar setting, however: the still scarred and shell-marked
landscape of the former front line on an isolated hilltop. All of them appear
to erupt from the soil of the battlefield, insisting on verticality whether it be
through the twisting flag that acts as a shroud wrapped around the rising
corpse of the monument du squelette, through the sheer scale of the stele at
Côte 304 or the clawing motion of Réal del Sarte’s ghostly arms.
While the monument du squelette dedicated to the 69th Division contin-
ues to employ the grotesque, it simultaneously asserts the moral authority
of the war generation. Inaugurated in 1922, the statue celebrates a
French victory, albeit a defensive one in which little ground was gained
from the enemy. The inscription celebrates this defence, rearticulating
Pétain’s slogan of 1916 (‘They will not pass’) in the affirmation ‘They did
not pass’. The figure is not actually a skeleton, but a rotting corpse; the
musculature on the arms, the presence of flesh on the face and some rem-
nants on the chest attest to this. A surging, rising motion is suggested by
the eruption of soil at the figure’s feet, but also by the twisting, spiralling
folds of the divisional flag which has been wrapped around the corpse as a
shroud. The figure suggests triumphalism and irrepressible strength, but it
Figure 2: Le Monument de Vauquois. Sculptor: Marius Roussell. Architect: E. Monestes. Photograph by

the author.
also evokes the physical effects of war. Like Gance’s war dead, this figure
has come back to show us its wounds, to point to the reality of the body
and the earthly. Yet it also suggests the moral supremacy of the war gen-
eration over those who stand dwarfed by the figure. It does this through its
evocation of the pride of victory and the insistence upon the physical suf-
fering undergone by the war generation. It therefore reflects the hesitation
that Annette Becker discerns in many French war memorials between
conventional images of heroism and sacrifice and a more realistic
acknowledgement of the horror of war (Becker 1987: 22). Although it
does not depict the indissoluble tie that Gance established between the
dead and war veterans, the monument du squelette is a monument erected
by veterans to the memory of their own hardship and sacrifice as well as
to their fallen comrades.
The link between the dead and war veterans is established visually in
two other major battlefield monuments in the Verdun area. At Vauquois, a
tower commemorates not the dead of the sector, but ‘All those brave men
who held the enemy at bay in this sector’. To the rear of the tower a
larger-than-life carving represents two soldiers in their trench. The figure
standing to the right holds a grenade in his right hand while his rifle rests
at his side, suggesting that he is repelling an attack. The figure is in keeping
166 Martin Hurcombe

Figure 3: Monument du 106e régiment, Les Éparges. Sculptor: Maxime Réal del Sarte. Inaugurated
1935. Photograph by the author.
with the inscription’s insistence on defence, but appears not only to be

defending the nation but also the dead soldier whose head we see emerging
from the parapet wall.
Réal del Sarte’s 1935 monument to the dead of the 106th regiment at
Les Éparges also suggests a connection between the living and the dead.
Réal del Sarte’s statue depicts a dreaming head mounted above the principal
inscription ‘I believe’. Beneath it, clawing their way towards the head, there
are five skeletal arms (two on each side of the monument and one to the
rear). Six skulls can also be seen to emerge from the base of a sculpture that
creates an ambivalent relationship between the surviving veteran and the
dead combatant. The dreamlike expression of the head might suggest a
calling up of the dead, the dreaming head cast here in the role of conductor,
drawing the dead up from their grave. Alternatively, we might consider that
the clawing hands of the dead are reclaiming the survivor, that the latter
belongs to the dead. A second inscription suggests further still the relation-
ship between the living veteran and the dead: ‘Les revenants du 106 R.I. à
leurs camarades de la 24ième brigade’ (‘From the survivors of the 106
Infantry Regiment to their comrades of the 24th Brigade’). Here again
there is ambiguity: the term revenant meaning ‘he who returns’, but
also ‘ghost’ in French. Just who is dedicating this memorial to whom? Is it the
survivors dedicating it to their fallen comrades or the ghosts of the fallen to

their comrades in arms? The monument and its inscription cause those
who view it to hesitate, but its very ambiguity also suggests a symbiotic
relationship between the living veteran and the war dead.
The dead continue to rise up in Bernard’s film Les Croix de bois, which
follows the military apprenticeship of Gilbert Demachy, a law student who
volunteers for active service as a simple infantryman. Although Les Croix
de bois is firmly rooted in realism, Bernard nevertheless reveals a debt to
J’Accuse. Gance’s influence is discernible primarily in the spectral quality
of the film’s characters. At the film’s opening we see row upon row of
infantrymen standing smartly to attention. These then fade into crosses in
an oblique reference to, and reversal of, the raising of the dead in J’Accuse.
The dead of the opening sequence are then resurrected as the characters
of the film, only to die again by the film’s end.
The dead rise again at various other points in the film. In one scene,
Bernard employs the same split-screen technique as Gance to similar ideologi-
cal ends when the image of a single line of dead soldiers, all carrying their
crosses, is superimposed on to the sky above Demachy’s regiment parading
proudly after a victory in front of its commander; the dead of battle are resur-
rected by Bernard as a riposte to the enthusiasm for warfare. As Demachy dies
at the film’s end, the dead are again seen to be on the march, carrying their
crosses across the screen, superimposed on to the shot of the dying Demachy.
Earlier, Demachy’s platoon finds itself pinned down by the enemy in a ceme-
tery. In another oblique reference to J’Accuse, soldiers emerge from the graves
in which they have been sheltering to come to the aid of their dying sergeant,
Bréval, killed selflessly collecting water from a well for his men.
However, Bernard’s film builds primarily on Gance’s metaphor of
redemptive sacrifice in its frequent references to the cross and its Christology
more generally; his dead do not march on the civilian population but always
seem to be ascending into the sky. The long-drawn-out treatment of Bréval’s
death highlights this and constitutes a moral challenge to non-combatant
viewers of the film in 1932. Demachy transports the fatally wounded Bréval
to the ruins of a chapel in which he is laid. His soldiers rush to his side, fram-
ing the dying man who lies in Demachy’s arms. In between his groans,
Bréval reveals that his wife has been unfaithful and curses her. As his death
approaches, however, he forgives her and instructs Demachy to tell her to be
‘sensible for the sake of the little one’. Bernard’s directing frames Bréval’s
dying moments within a structure that is both visually and structurally rem-
iniscent of the crucifixion; the scene is framed in such a way as to evoke
memories of the Thirteenth Station of the Cross, but it is also structured,
through Bréval’s uncomprehending cursing of his wife (‘Why did she do
that to me?’) and his plea for forgiveness (‘It’s not her fault’), in such a way
as to recall Christ’s sense of desertion on the cross and his plea that his per-
secutors be forgiven. However, the film’s Christology, like Gance’s grotesque,
serves to interrogate the viewer as to his or her behaviour during wartime
whilst also offering the possibility of appeasement; Bréval’s death accuses
the non-combatant of betrayal only to forgive, thereby doubling the moral
authority of the generation whose sacrifice is portrayed on the screen.
The use of Christology is not restricted to Les Croix de bois; Réal del Sarte’s
monument carries a bronze plaque at its base that depicts a pietà (Figure 4).
168 Martin Hurcombe

Figure 4: Bronze plaque from the Monument du 106e régiment, Les Éparges. Photograph by the author.
Here, as in other pietàs that feature on war memorials, the body of a dead
French infantryman has been substituted for that of Christ, while Mary has
become Joan of Arc, a reflection of Réal del Sarte’s nationalism, but also of
his Catholic faith. While for Winter (1995: 93) the adaptation of the pietà
exists as a form of consolation, supplying ‘the rudiments of hope, of aes-
thetic redemption, of transcendence’, its substitution of the dead combat-
ant’s body for that of Christ also exists in order to reinforce the moral
authority of a generation of veterans forever associated with the sacrifice of
the war dead. Moreover, the gradual preference for images of redemptive
sacrifice over the grotesque serves to reinforce those claims made by veterans
for a greater role in civil society and French political life already outlined and
then to consolidate this once achieved. Increasingly, such images serve as a
reminder and a justification for the influence achieved by some of the larger
veterans’ movements as well as a continued demand to be consulted.
The return of the dead: J’Accuse (1938)

While in the early 1930s French war veterans saw themselves on the
point of achieving the influence their generation’s sacrifice merited, by
1934 there were increasing causes for concern that undermined veterans’
optimism. Demands for increased war pensions fell on deaf ears while par-
liamentary politics and the economy stagnated under a series of short-lived,
ineffectual governments. Increasingly, veterans began to feel that their

moment had passed and that, once again, they were being pushed to the
margins of society. In 1936, national unity seemed threatened by the election
of a leftist Popular Front government, while war in Spain threatened to
plunge Europe into a second world war. It was this last threat that was to
mobilize many veterans, the vast majority of whom were opposed to all
future war, and prompted Gance to raise the dead once more in his 1938
version of J’Accuse.
Gance’s second version of J’Accuse opens with a shot of the monument
du squelette in Argonne, with the opening titles projected upon the statue’s
plinth, dedicating the film to ‘the preservation of universal peace’ in the
name of ‘the four million war wounded’ and the gueules cassées (the term
for those with facial disfigurements), among others. While it retains the
principal characters of the original (Jean, François and Edith), it begins in
1918 when Jean (played by Victor Francen) and François declare a truce in
their battle for Edith. The two comrades then form part of a platoon sent
out on a final and futile reconnaissance mission on 10 November. While
François returns severely injured, all the others are believed to have died.
As those whose bodies have been recovered are prepared for burial, ghostly
groaning begins to emanate from the shroud under which Jean’s body lies.
Jean, still alive, is then laid next to the dying François. Here, Gance repeats
the scene of the original whereby François grasps Jean’s hand in his last
flicker of life.
The majority of the remainder of the film takes place in the 1930s.
Jean informs Edith that they can never again be lovers as François is
watching over them both. He withdraws subsequently to the Verdun area
where he develops a formula for ‘steel glass’, a material so strong that it
will render all weaponry, and therefore warfare, useless, in a workshop
that communicates via an underground passage with the unmarked
graves of those combatants whose bodies were never recovered. In the
course of his excavations, Jean discovers a terrible secret: the dead are still
living. Increasingly convinced that he has been charged by the dead with
a mission to prevent war, Jean appears to be plunged into madness. As
world war looms, however, and when he learns that Edith’s new husband,
the fascistic leader Henry Chimay, has stolen his formula and put it into
production in his armament factories, Jean summons up the dead.
Gance’s second version of J’Accuse continues to draw on the moral
authority of the war generation much as images of the 1920s and early
1930s had. Like Les Croix de bois, therefore, it makes use of images of the
cross to suggest redemptive sacrifice. The film opens with the shot of
Christ on the crucifix just as Gance’s earlier version closed on a crucifixion
image. Here, however, the Christ has been damaged by shell fire and now
hangs upside down in a well of poisoned water, suggesting the redemptive
promise of the original has been overturned. During one combat sequence,
a soldier is seen to fall, his arms splayed in the form of a cross. When Jean
retires to Verdun, he arranges the individual photographs of his platoon
members in a cross above his single bed. Finally, Jean’s death as the dead
march on the cities of Europe at the film’s end takes the form of Christ-like
martyrdom: he is tied to a war memorial and burned to death by an angry
mob. The cross here, as in Les Croix de bois, serves not so much as an
170 Martin Hurcombe

injunction to mourn and to remember, but to insist upon the sacrifice of 7. All translations of the
the war generation. script are my own.
In addition to intensifying the redemptive sacrifice motifs of the origi-
nal, this version also restates the role of the veteran as a conduit for the will
of the sacrificed generation with greater intensity. Indeed, the Jean Diaz of
this version is an other-worldly character with a propensity for the
prophetic where the Jean of the original was merely a dreamy poet. This
other-worldliness is communicated in Francen’s near constant mid-
distance stare as well as through the reiteration of the relationship between
the veteran and the dead in François’s death-bed scene. Moreover, even
before the death of the platoon, Jean swears that the survivors will safe-
guard his promise of a future without war. This vow is repeated at the
graveside of the platoon where Jean dedicates himself to maintaining
peace, whilst admitting:
I am only a poor, little man. […] But I have all your strength in me; all the
strength of all the dead. I will be your word and your gesture in order to stop
tomorrow’s war. I swear this to you, I who knew you, who loved you, who
love you still.7
Jean becomes the conduit through which the will of the dead can be com-
municated. When war breaks out he interposes himself between the living
and the dead, offering himself up to the latter as ‘your spirit, your will on
this earth’. In the midst of a storm, he then summons the dead of all
nations. Using some of the sequence from the original version of J’Accuse,
Gance raises the dead again. In a longer and more elaborate version of the
original, however, we see skeletal airmen flying over Europe; French,
German and American soldiers marching on its cities and towns and the
face of disfigured war veterans floating across the sky; while the monument
du squelette in Argonne comes to life and climbs down from its pedestal.
Again, the emphasis is on the physical reality of war as the wounds of the
dead become central to conveying the film’s pacifist message. Indeed,
viewers are instructed to ‘fill [their] eyes with these horrors’ as the camera
focuses on the disfigured face of one veteran in particular.
In Gance’s second version, dead combatants do not descend on their
homes to demand personal justice of the living. Rather, they march on
railway stations and ports in order to prevent the departure of the next
generation of combatants; their action is primarily political rather than
individual and is aimed at paralysing the mechanisms of state authority.
Following their initial panic, in which Jean is martyred, and following a
radical reversal of previously entrenched positions, the Universal States
General is convened, chaired by Chimay. As in the original, Gance closes
his film with the possibility of redemption, having invoked the subversive
power of the grotesque to overthrow the powers that be. War is declared
illegal, Chimay declaring to universal acclaim: ‘War is dead, the world is
renewed.’ The dead return to their graves once more, but only after having
imposed their politics upon those of the living and having imposed reason
upon a world poised on the brink of the insanity of war.
Again, Gance depicts a world turned on its head in order to suggest an
alternative to received wisdom in 1938 that war was inevitable. As in the
original, this is achieved through the raising of the war dead and Gance’s use
of the grotesque in the revelation of the wounded and decaying body as a
force for dethroning commonly held perceptions. Here Gance is attempting to
use what Philip Thomson considers to be the shock-effect of the grotesque;
‘its ability to bewilder and disorient, to bring the reader [sic] up short, jolt him
[sic] out of accustomed ways of perceiving the world and confront him with
a radically different, disturbing perspective’ (Thomson 1972: 58). In the sec-
ond version of J’Accuse, Gance is espousing and, through the return of the
dead, advocating the pacifism that characterized virtually every veteran
movement in France immediately prior to the Second World War.
Conclusion
The grotesque, and images of redemptive sacrifice, coalesce in visual repre-
sentations of dead combatants returning from the grave. As we have seen,
the grotesque nature of some of these images is tied to a reminder of the
physical reality of war. The eruption of the decaying corpse exhibiting its
wounds, like that of the skeleton, subverts nationalistic discourse
concerning the war in the case of Gance without necessarily being unpatri-
otic. In its uncanniness and its defamiliarization of the world, it causes
doubt and hesitation, making the spectator less resistant to alternative per-
spectives. In the space that it creates it asks the question of the spectator:
was it worth this? Yet, the use of the grotesque also denotes French war
veterans’ sense of marginality, their fear of failing to play the role that
should be theirs. Its recurrence suggests a struggle on the part of veterans
to accede to such a role, confirming Prost’s assertion that, during the inter-
war years, war veterans remain witnesses to history rather than its agents
(Prost 1977a: 202).
Images of redemptive sacrifice also use representations of wounding
and bodily pain, but tie these specifically to issues of moral authority
through the affinity that is created between Christ’s sacrifice on the cross
and that of the combatant generation. Here there is less of a question and
more of a challenge: a challenge to make the suffering worthwhile gener-
ated by what Michael Rowlands (2001: 143) terms ‘the internal economy
of sacrifice’ contained within war memorials in the questions: ‘Who is
giving, what are they giving up and to whom?’
Both sets of images therefore serve an intensely moral purpose. Yet, they
are also political; the Christology of images of redemptive sacrifice is not
only a means of commemorating the dead, as Winter has argued, but also,
in the images examined here, of asserting the veterans’ right to lead the
nation, a motivation Prost (1977b: 146) discerns behind much of the vet-
erans’ political and civic activity in the interwar years. Both sets of images
therefore serve to emphasize French veterans’ sense of the debt owed to
them. As Paul Ricoeur has suggested in respect of the work of Martin
Heidegger, the notion of intergenerational debt depends upon one genera-
tion recognizing the bodily reality of earlier generations in the acknowl-
edgement that: ‘Today’s dead are the living and suffering agents of
yesterday’ (my translation). The re-presentation of death (drawing the dead
back into the present) not only enforces this debt, but also allows for older
generations to influence the conduct of younger generations (Ricoeur
172 Martin Hurcombe

2000: 495). These two sets of images are therefore held within individual
works in a dialogic tension that corresponds to the veterans’ position and
aims in French society at each work’s moment of production. According to
the needs of the day, whether these were to convince the French public
of the physical horror of war or of the need for a greater say on the part of
veterans in the political life of France, the relationship between the subver-
sive grotesque and redemptive sacrifice would shift to allow one or other to
dominate.
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my gratitude to the British Academy for their support of this
project. I was able to carry out the necessary research and fieldwork thanks to a
British Academy Small Research Grant and to deliver some of my preliminary find-
ings at ‘Space, Haunting, Discourse’, a conference held at Karlstad University,
Sweden thanks to a British Academy Overseas Conference Grant.
References
Bakhtin, M. (1968), Rabelais and His World (trans. H. Iswolsky), Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press. First published in Russian in 1965.
Becker, A. (1987), Les Monuments aux morts: mémoire de la grande guerre, Paris:
Éditions Errance.
Comolli, J.-L. and Narboni, J. (1994), ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (trans. S.
Bennett), in Antony Easthope (ed.), Contemporary Film Theory, London:
Longman, pp. 43–52.
Connelly, F. (ed.) (2003), Modern Art and the Grotesque, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fortescue, W. (2000), The Third Republic in France, 1870 –1940: Conflicts and
Continuities, London: Routledge.
Freud, S. (1955), ‘The Uncanny’, in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, London:
The Hogarth Press, pp. 217–56. First published in German in 1919.
Huss, M.-M. (2004), ‘Belonging to a “Grandiose” Family: Vision Memory and
Representation of the Chain of Solidarity Between the Generations in French
First World War Culture’, in W. Kidd and B. Murdoch (eds), Memory and
Memorials: The Commemorative Century, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Prost, A. (1977a), Les Anciens Combattants et la société française 1914 –39, vol. 1,
Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques.
—— (1977b), Les Anciens Combattants et la société française 1914 –39, vol. 3, Paris:
Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques.
Ricoeur, P. (2000), La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris: Seuil.
Rowlands, M. (2001), ‘Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War
Memorials’, in A. Forty and S. Küchler (eds) The Art of Forgetting, Oxford: Berg,
pp. 129– 45.
Royle, N. (2003), The Uncanny, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Thomson, P. (1972), The Grotesque, London: Methuen.
Todorov, T. (1970), Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris: Seuil.
Welsh, J. and Kramer, S. (1978), Abel Gance, New York: Twayne.
Winter, J. (1995), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Films
Bernard, Raymond (1932), Les Croix de bois, distributed by Pathé-Nathan (no
longer available on video).
Gance, Abel (1919), J’Accuse, distributed by Pathé Frères (never available on
video/DVD).
—— (1938), J’Accuse, produced and distributed by Forrester-Parant Productions
(no longer available on video).
Suggested citation
Hurcombe, M. (2008), ‘Raising the dead: visual representations of the combat-
ant’s body in interwar France’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1: 2,
pp. 159–174, doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.159/1
Contributor details
Martin Hurcombe is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol and Joint
Editor of the Journal for War and Culture Studies. He is the author of Novelists in
Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War and has
also published articles on committed literature of the 1930s with particular
reference to the Spanish Civil War. Contact: Dr Martin Hurcombe, School of
Modern Languages, University of Bristol, 17 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TE.
E-mail: M.J.Hurcombe@bristol.ac.uk
174 Martin Hurcombe

JWCS_1.2_05_art_Duffy.qxd 2/28/08 4:40 PM Page 175
The veteran’s wounded body before the

mirror: the dialectic of wholeness and
disintegration in Andreï Makine’s prose
Helena Duffy University of New England
Abstract Keywords
A central point of historical reference in the writing of contemporary Russian- Makine
born French author, Andreï Makine, namely the Second World War, which redrew war
the map of Europe and redressed the balance of power in world politics, both to the body
advantage of the Soviet Union, allows this highly successful novelist to remind his amputation
western readers of Russia’s former military might and to re-posit the Soviet dismemberment
regime – generally seen as a perpetrator of crimes against both other nations and maiming
the Russian people – as victim. The soldier’s wounded body emerges as concrete mutilation
proof of the Soviet Union’s sacrifice in the struggle against fascism and as wounding
metaphor for the empire’s disintegration as a consequence of Russia’s opening to
western capital and values. Read first from a Foucauldian and then from a
Lacanian perspective, the samovar (a soldier who has lost all his limbs) and other,
less drastic, forms of wounding will be interpreted as surfaces painfully inscribed
and even ruined by language, culture and history, and as an expression of the nar-
rator’s longing for the morselized body’s fusion with the mother that precedes the
mirror stage in the infant’s development. Reflected in Makine’s neo-realistic
prose, the dismembered body becomes, paradoxically – like the samovar in the
original sense of the word – a figure of wholeness with the potential to counter
post-Soviet despondency.
Introduction: the samovar and other mutilations

A symbol of communal tea-drinking and an object associated with Russian 1. This and all the
following translations
exotica and nostalgia, in Andreï Makine’s novels the samovar acquires a from the French are
sinister meaning, transmogrified from a figure of totality and continuity my own.
into a euphemism for a war veteran who has lost his limbs and whose
stumps resemble the handles and feet of the tea-making device. Other, less
drastic forms of wounding sustained by soldiers during various Soviet-era
military conflicts featuring in Makine’s prose are scars, amputated legs or
arms, fingers lost through frostbite or a defective submachine gun, or pieces
of shrapnel embedded in the flesh: ‘embittered one-armed men, drunken
legless cripples, heroic debris of victory’ (Makine 2004: 86).1
The proliferation of maimed bodies in the work of the Russian-born
author, who publishes exclusively in French, can be explained, on one
level, biographically. Born in 1957, Makine was brought up at a time
when Russians were still reeling from some 26 million casualties and
other terrible consequences of the Second World War, including thousands

2. The term is used in of permanent disabilities, massive disruption to family life, a great number
Russia to describe the of orphans, not to mention damage suffered by the economy and infra-
war of 1941–45
between Nazi structure. Also, by the time Makine was growing up, community com-
Germany and the memorations of the war were finally being encouraged; the formation of
Soviet Union whilst veteran groups was permitted and regimental parades on 9 May were once
the Second World
War refers to the again being held, whilst in official discourse the Great Patriotic War2
worldwide conflict became, as Geoffrey Hosking (2006: 230) puts it, ‘“the sacred past” of a
of 1939–45. new form of messianic, Russian-led internationalism’. Moreover, before
coming to France in 1987 Makine lived in a society routinely exposed to
injuries resulting from other conflicts and especially from the Red Army’s
prolonged presence in Afghanistan, which produced particularly high
numbers of permanent disabilities.
Whilst mutilations are undoubtedly inseparable from the socio-historical
landscape of Makine’s novels, the writer’s quasi-obsessive interest in
amputations, wounds and scars may be also interpreted as metaphorizing
his narrators’ sense of loss issuing from the disintegration and eclipse of
an empire, be it Tsarist or Soviet. If the body, as Michel Foucault has it, is a
space inscribed and effectively ruined by history (Foucault 1994b: 143),
Makine, as I argue in the first part of this article, uses the body, castrated
by necessarily negative historico-cultural significations, to rewrite Russia’s
past for the sake of his western readers. Rather than as perpetrator
of crimes against its own people and other nationalities, the author
re-presents his homeland as innocent victim and heroic saviour. The
plethora of wounded bodies also fulfils another function, as I demonstrate
later in my discussion, now approaching the writer’s preoccupation with
dismemberment from a Lacanian perspective. Whilst the endless descrip-
tions of mutilations can potentially restore in Makine’s narrators a sense
of wholeness and integrity, and the French language used to articulate
their loss can propel them back across the crevice between the semiotic
and the symbolic, with its traditional aesthetics Makine’s oeuvre provides
a space within which the past can be resurrected (and retouched) and
fragmented geopolitical entities re-established.
Writing on the body

According to Foucault (1976: 180), wars, once waged to protect the sov-
ereign and these days declared in the name of the common good, are a
manifestation of the state’s power over the citizen’s life and death within a
congenitally asymmetrical relationship. Although the twentieth century
produced unprecedentedly bloody wars and previously unimaginable
holocausts, the state’s power presents itself as one that ‘exerts itself posi-
tively on life, […] undertakes to cure it, to enhance it, to multiply it, to impose
on it precise controls and comprehensive rules’ (Foucault 1976: 180), an
idea that originates in the nineteenth century where the social body was
first seen as in need of quasi-medical care (Foucault 1994a: 754).
Consequently, for Foucault the neo-Nietzschean genealogist, the exercise
of power is inherently material, physical and in particular corporeal
(Foucault 1994a: 756). For Foucault, the body is
a surface inscribed by events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the

locus of a dissociated Self […], a volume in perpetual disintegration.
176 Helena Duffy

Genealogy, as a study of descent, […] must expose a body totally imprinted

by history and history ruining the body.
(Foucault 1994b: 143)
Foucault’s claim that the body is caught up in power regimes and shaped
by ideology – ‘the demagogue is led to effect the degeneration of the body
in order to establish the sovereignty of a timeless idea’ (Foucault 1994b:
149–51) – provides an appropriate point of departure for a reading of
Makine’s novels where wounded war veterans – a literal illustration of his-
tory’s power to imprint itself on the body – feature prominently, and where
the Russian language, appropriated by propaganda, connotes paternal
authority and is a means of violence. Foucault’s belief that ‘it is indeed in
discourse that power and knowledge find their articulation’ (Foucault
1976: 133) is best illustrated by Requiem pour l’Est (2000) which speaks of
the rise, apex and collapse of the Soviet empire through the lives of three
men who fight in the Civil War, the Great Patriotic War and various
African conflicts respectively. Language, a patriarchal state and violence to
the body converge in the story of a soldier, named after the initials of
Marx, Lenin, Engels and Stalin. Having failed to cry Stalin’s name when
going into battle, Malerst is sent to a penal battalion and indeed his verbal
impunity is chastized when a bullet takes off his jaw.
Foucault’s belief that human beings may not exist outside history, a
signifying practice that requires the subjugation of the body and the
inscription of its surface, is also reflected in the life of the protagonist’s
father. Having witnessed quasi-infernal scenes on the battlefield, Pavel
refuses to propagate the regime’s official version of the war and is accused
of tarnishing the glossy image of Victory just as in Le Testament français
(1997) the samovars, whose bodies speak an inconvenient narrative, are
removed from public view. To escape the regime’s language and jurisdic-
tion Pavel settles in the Caucasus, yet his peace is literally shattered when
the rock that has sheltered his house is dynamited as part of some
grandiose project meant to signify Soviet military-technological supremacy.
By calling this event ‘the accidental play of symbols’ Makine construes the
state–individual relationship as one structured by language and indeed the
term pierre that designates the boulder thrust into the house by the explo-
sion becomes the first word acquired by Pavel’s son (Makine 2000: 13). In
Kristeva’s terms this moment marks the ‘thetic break’ that signifies the
child’s traumatic passage from the semiotic chora – a non-expressive total-
ity formed by drives – to the symbolic (Kristeva 1974: 22–30). Indeed, the
detonation demolishes the infant’s unity with the mother within the space
of sounds, images and scents – ‘even the day before, everything was meld-
ing into a luminous panoply of sounds, skies and familiar faces’ (Makine
2000: 17) – and forces him as the subject to separate from and through
his image, and from and through his objects: ‘the subject leaves his fusion
with the mother, confines his jouissance to the genital and transfers his
semiotic motility to the symbolic order’ (Kristeva 1974: 45). Just as pierre
(rock), which, in Kristevan terms, marks the protagonist’s passage from
the rhythmic, maternal and nourishing space of the chora to the world of
sign and syntax, is phonologically linked to père (father) and evocative of
St Peter, the father of the Church, the subsequent words that the child
The veteran’s wounded body before the mirror: the dialectic of wholeness … 177
3. See Otto Rank’s The learns painfully fix him in the symbolic patriarch’s universe: ‘The world
Myth of the Birth of grows larger, swarms, destroys the singularity of those who surrounded
the Hero and Other
Writings (1964). him before […]. He no longer wants anything to do with this world where
everything is undermined by words. He does not want to understand’
4. See the chapter ‘Born
in the Bania’ in (Makine 2000: 18–19). Whilst ‘people’ become the assassins of the child’s
Daniel Rancour- father, ‘house’ signifies his parents’ now empty abode. Named, objects ‘are
Laferriere’s The Slave sore on the eye, create a painful need to respond’ and this negative invest-
Soul of Russia where
the author discusses ment of language and its association with absence will persist until
the maternal another orphan tells the adolescent protagonist that his father was
overtones of the gunned down ‘like a dog’ (Makine 2000: 18–19).
Russian bathhouse
and mentions the fact The violence inherent in language is countered by the child’s brief rein-
that, as in English, in tegration into the maternal realm when Sacha, Pavel’s French acquain-
Russian the plural tance, carries him to safety, holding his shirt between her teeth like an
vody (waters) refers to
the amniotic fluid of animal. The episode alludes to the myths of Oedipus or Romulus and
the womb, or that in Remus, as well as to the legend of Moses, where a newborn future hero is
many parts of Russia condemned to death or exposure, usually on the orders of his father, but is
peasants address
water as ‘mother’ rescued by animals or humble people.3 Sacha’s passage across a stream has
(Rancour-Laferriere a double maternal connotation: whilst the ropes of the bridge evoke the
1995: 189–93). umbilical cord, the water flowing underneath is associated with the mother
5. It may be more and with birth, this link being particularly pronounced in Russian lore.4
appropriate to use The reverse journey to the semiotic is lubricated by the sounds of an incom-
the Russian term
as, unlike ‘fate’ or prehensible language whose charm and salutary potential lie precisely in
‘destiny’, it bears, as its resistance to signification: ‘the words have a strange, meaning-free
Anna Wierzbicka beauty’ (Makine 2000: 20). However, despite the melodious quality of his
states, the imprint
of the tradition of adopted tongue – ‘its undulating rhythm, […] the velvety softness of its
blind submission to sounds’ (Makine 2000: 20) – it is in French that the dismemberment of the
authority and the Soviet Union will be announced to the protagonist who, importantly, imme-
correlated ‘humble,
uncomplaining diately expresses his loss as amputation: ‘I was thinking that it was thus for
acceptance of our native country, our fatherland, lost or reduced to the status of a
hardship and shadow, and which arouses in us both love and a sense of being torn apart,
suffering epitomised
in the Russian in the most intimate pulsations of severed veins’ (Makine 2000: 205).
Orthodox ideal of A more literal illustration of Foucault’s view that the body is perpetu-
smirenie’ (Wierzbicka ally destroyed by history may be sought in the injuries suffered in the
1992: 96–97).
Great Patriotic War or the Soviet Union’s interventions in Africa that pro-
6. In his controversial vide the historical backdrop for Requiem pour l’Est and L’Amour humain
and at times naïve
study of Russian (2006). However, Foucault’s reading of wars as symptomatic of the state’s
masochism, Rancour- brutality towards its own people is challenged by Makine’s novels where,
Laferriere (1995: alongside purges, deportations, famines, cramped living conditions or food
6–15), for example,
claims that the shortages, armed conflicts are the irrevocable ingredients of the Russians’
Russians suffer more fate – or rather sud'ba5 – and a manifestation of evil, which, following
than any other nation Dostoevsky, Makine sees as an abstract and anonymous force originating
and that this fact
proceeds from their and residing outside man. When in an uncharacteristic moment of rebel-
congenital self- lion the protagonist of Le Testament français seeks the source of the calami-
destructiveness ties raining upon the Russians, he confusedly points an accusatory finger
or simply a need to
suffer. first at Stalin and then at God before accepting suffering as part of his
national identity and thus endorsing the stereotypical view of Russians as
7. See, for example,
Civilisation and its masochists (Makine 1997: 260).6
Discontents (1930) Supporting the well-established link between fate and the paternal figure,7
where Freud locates and still partially absolving the repressive state, the conflict between the
the origins of the
prohibitive father and the rebellious son being seen, at least by psychoanalysis,
178 Helena Duffy

as primordial, universal and inevitable, on other occasions Makine recasts notions of Moira,
the Russians’ sufferings into the Oedipal framework. A Freudian reading of Destiny, Providence
or Divine Will in the
his work is further encouraged by psychoanalytical interpretations of the childhood need to feel
novelist’s homeland attempted by scholars including Rancour-Laferriere, loved and protected by
who states that in Russia the paternal metaphor has traditionally struc- the (paternal) parent.
tured both the political and the religious realm.8 Gary Cox goes yet further 8. Whilst some tsars
when defining Russian culture as Oedipal par excellence. This means a were affectionately
referred to as
combination of ‘authoritarian rampage’ with Russians’ submissiveness to batiushka (little
over-energetic authority, which, by shifting the emphasis from patricide to father), Peter was
the state’s perpetual violence towards helpless people, somewhat destabilizes known as Otets
Otchestva (Father of
the classic Oedipal paradigm (Cox 1989: 453). the Fatherland) and
Echoing Freud’s much-contested treatise on the origins of the Oedipus Stalin was called
complex in the primal horde, Makine depicts Russians as a nation marked ‘Father’, ‘Father of
the Peoples’, ‘Wise
by ‘the resignation of a human herd violated by a despot’ (Makine 1997: Father’, ‘Beloved
211) and governed by a tyrant whose existence he describes as ‘mythical’ Father’ and so forth
and who, like the primal father, arouses ambivalence in his people and (Rancour-Laferriere
1995: 136–37).
hence lives in fear of being killed: ‘[r]evered or hated, he was in the heart
of all. Praised by day, he was cursed by night’ (Makine 2000: 13). Similarly, 9. Komunalka is a
communal apartment
in Le Testament français Aliocha experiences a mixture of admiration where several families
and abhorrence for the perverse and insatiable sexual appetite of Lavrenty live, usually one
Beria: ‘I could not help myself admiring this stalker of women. Yes, family per room,
sharing the bathroom
there was someone inside me who – in fright, in revulsion, in shame – was and the kitchen.
enraptured by the power of the man wearing the pince-nez’ (Makine Allowing no privacy,
1997: 210). Like the primal father who ‘prevented his sons from satisfying this distinctive
housing system was
their directly sexual impulsions; he forced them into abstinence and one of the ways in
consequently into emotional ties with him and with one another’ (Freud which the Soviet state
1955b: 156), Stalin’s notorious NKVD chief kidnaps, rapes and murders a controlled the people.
new victim every night, whilst ordinary Russians live in a sexual absti-
nence fostered by official asceticism, sub-zero temperatures and layers of
unflattering clothing. Crucially, in Makine’s work the primal horde-like
society is epitomized by the Army; unified by their clothes, gestures and
imposed chastity, these young men will provide cannon fodder in future
wars declared in the name of Russia’s special role in the struggle of good
against evil, decolonization or the crusade against America’s greed-inspired
imperialism (Makine 1997: 221).
That amputations resulting from wars may be read as metaphorizing
the castration with which the patriarchal ruler threatens and punishes the
people is confirmed by the fate of Sacha Semionov in La Fille d’un héros de
l’Union soviétique (1996). Meeting his former comrade some forty years
after the Great Fatherland War, as the Russian term may also be trans-
lated, Ivan Demidov is surprised to see that Sacha, discharged due to a
minor injury to his toe, is missing an entire leg. Performed in makeshift
conditions, the amputation equalled emasculation: ‘we were butchered in
haste. In my case […] I had all the nerves in my groin cut as if I had been
castrated. What woman would have wanted me after this?’ (Makine
1996a: 148). Ironically, whilst other soldiers have envied Sacha his return
to his wife, the amputee is condemned to sexual deprivation and financial
hardship (he lives in a komunalka9 and his pension barely suffices to buy a
bottle of vodka), not to mention the discomfort he suffers through an ill-
fitted prosthesis (Makine 1996a: 148).
10. This is illustrated by By recasting the Communist regime’s relationship with the people into
the story of Ivan and the context of the ancient myth as interpreted by Réné Girard (1972) who,
Tatiana Demidov in
La Fille d’un héros de absolving Oedipus of his responsibility for the double crime, reinvents him
l’Union soviétique who as a scapegoat in a sacrificial crisis, Makine victimizes not only the
internalize and Russians but also the Soviet state, dismemberment serving as a trope for
promulgate the
sanitized version of both the violence suffered by individuals at their rulers’ hands and the
the war concocted fragmentation of the Soviet Union. Despite Makine’s criticism of the distor-
by propaganda. tion of reality for political ends and of those who, although possessing
first-hand experience, are quick to embrace official discourse,10 he himself
rewrites history in a way that suits his political agenda, in tune with a self-
eulogizing and self-pitying discourse very much de rigueur in post-Soviet
Russia.
Displaying the wounded body

Although Makine has lived in France for 20 years, writes directly in
French and produces predominantly for the consumption of French
readers, nearly all his narratives are set in his homeland, which may be
surprising unless seen as part of a political project consisting in re-
presenting Russia to the West as liberator of Europe and victim of
unfavourable circumstances and, as I posit finally, in symbolically con-
solidating a disseminated geopolitical realm. That in Makine’s prose the
body, stigmatized by history, acts as concrete and incontestable proof of
Russia’s sacrifice in combating Hitler, is spelt out by Requiem pour l’Est
whose ex-KGB narrator haunts Parisian drawing-rooms searching for
his former collaborator and lover who, unlike himself, has remained in
the secret service after the collapse of the Soviet Union. During these
gatherings, populated by pseudo-artists and pseudo-intellectuals, the
former spy encounters flippant remarks, witticisms and platitudes about
his homeland that the French compare to ‘a black hole which swallows
up anything thrown into it’ whilst describing Russians themselves as
‘allergic to democracy’ (Makine 2000: 204). On another occasion he
becomes exacerbated by the direct translation of the slowness of the Red
Army’s offensive into the number of victims in the Nazi concentration
camps, which could have been much lower had the Russians, as it is
alleged, not been dragging their feet. To his outrage the French question
the actual number of casualties, insinuating that the figure of 20 million
is propaganda and must include deaths from natural causes. They then
list shameful episodes in Russian history such as the Ribbentrop-
Molotov pact or the massacre of Polish officers in Katyń, or state that if it
had not been for the Americans Stalin would have taken over the whole
of Europe.
To counter these arguments, which the protagonist finds insignifi-
cant in the face of the Russians’ pivotal role in the struggle against fas-
cism and offensive to the memory of those who died in liberating
Europe, he narrates the stories of three generations of men: his grand-
father, his father and himself. These abound in descriptions of bloody
battles and consequently in images of horrific injuries: bodies split in
half or gutted, burns and torn-off limbs. Even when seen through the
eyes of Nikolaï’s horse, the war is described in terms of its destructive
impact on the body.
180 Helena Duffy

On the many paths he had followed through the war, Renard had seen
horses drowning and horses ripped apart by shells, and this stallion with his
front legs torn off and trying to get up in a monstrous jolt, and this team of
horses abandoned in the deep peat of a swamp: the horses kept sinking
deeper and deeper, prisoners of a useless cannon.
(Makine 2000: 113)
Likewise, the memories haunting the protagonist who used to spy under
the cover of a surgeon are those of wounded bodies: an arm sticking out
from the wreckage of a tank, a soldier who commits suicide having had
both arms surgically removed, or an armed vehicle hit by a rocket and
compared to a torn-apart body: ‘[T]he electric cables were akin to blood
vessels, the smashed-in and blood-spattered dashboard akin to the brain of
a fantastic creature, a futuristic beast of war’ (Makine 2000: 24). The
most horrifying mutilations are, however, those witnessed by the protago-
nist’s father on the Eastern Front. At the beginning of his story Pavel
states ‘that he had seen all that anyone could see of death, so that no
bullet-riddled, maimed or dismembered body could now surprise him with
its freakish mutilations’, yet the reader may not be spared a litany of
polymorphous injuries (Makine 2000: 150).
As suggested earlier, in his first novel Makine demonstrates a certain
distance towards the legacy of the war embodied by Ivan Demidov, an
embittered and whimpering veteran who loses his first child to famine and
his wife to collective violence and, who, having succumbed to drink, falls
from glory. On discovering that his daughter Olia is a prostitute servicing
western businessmen, Ivan takes his anger out on a Beriozka, a store sell-
ing foreign and high-quality Russian goods for hard currency. Failing to
realize that it is the KGB and not the West or westernizers who have trig-
gered Olia’s downfall, he vandalizes the shop and accuses the staff and the
customers of having turned his daughter into a whore to the West. Despite
the narrator’s implicit condemnation of Ivan’s internalization of the Soviet
regime’s official discourse which, whilst glorifying the Russians’ superhu-
man effort in combating Hitler, vilified the West as an heir to the fascist
legacy, the hero’s desperate cry: ‘I’m the one who shed vats of blood for
you, bastards! I’m the one who saved you from the brown plague!’ res-
onates through Makine’s entire oeuvre (Makine 1996a: 171). Repeatedly
offering the same uncritical depiction of the war, Makine’s novels may not
only give his loyal readers a sense of déjà vu, but also remind them of
Communist propaganda, according to which ‘the Soviet people saved the
peoples of Europe and Asia from fascist tyranny’, this great service to
humanity ‘inspir[ing] in the hearts of Soviet people a legitimate feeling of
national pride’ (Hosking 2006: 232).
There are no real villains amongst Russian soldiers or civilians por-
trayed by Makine. Moreover, the crimes of the Soviet state against other
nations, such as the deliberately organized Ukrainian famine, are conve-
niently glossed over. Apart from occasional rape scenes, which in any case
fit into Makine’s conception of sex as intrinsically aggressive and animalis-
tic, featuring in all his novels be they set in times of war or peace, in the
Soviet Union or elsewhere, there is little evidence of Russians’ brutality
towards each other or towards members of other nationalities. Although it
11. See, for example, is a well-known fact that the war coincided with a rise in anti-Semitism
‘Dostoevskii and amongst ordinary Russians, in Requiem pour l’Est Pavel easily overcomes
Russian Messianism’
in Hosking (2006: the ‘mixture of disappointment and defiance’ he first feels towards a
24–26). Jewish soldier (Makine 2000: 167–68). Likewise, by having Ivan Demidov
12. Matrioshkas are reminisce about girls throwing themselves at their ‘liberators’ and about
wooden, nesting, the two timepieces that he ‘found’ in a bombed-out shop in Berlin, Makine
kerchiefed and goes against common knowledge concerning the Soviet soldiers’ sexual
rosy-cheeked dolls
that come in sets. violence and their habit of relieving the local population of valuables,
Each of the dolls, including watches.
apart from the Despite the programmatic godlessness of his novelistic universe, by re-
smallest one, can be
pulled apart to reveal positing Russia as both saviour and martyr Makine inscribes his work into
another figure of the the long-standing tradition of messianism, the wounded body becoming a
same sort inside. reference to Christ’s sacrifice, which Makine evokes by styling the renewal
of his characters’ identity on the Resurrection. Reinterpreted in turn by
Slavophiles, Communists and, most recently, Eurasianists, the messianic
idea was most famously developed by Dostoyevsky who championed the
apparent contradiction between the ‘Russian Christ’ and Moscow as
the third Rome.11 Secularized by Communism, messianism meant that the
Russians were the principal protagonists in the struggle against fascism
(and later American expansionism), and that they should be ‘encouraging,
inspiring and helping the other Soviet peoples and other nations of
the socialist bloc to play their part in it’ (Hosking 2006: 235). In the post-
Soviet era Russia’s leadership has been played down to the advantage
of Russophobia and the conviction about Russia’s centuries-old mission
of challenging the West. ‘Very often’, notes George Gibian, ‘one hears
the phrase: “We fed them and we liberated them. […] And now other
nationalities have all turned against us. We, the Russians, are poor
because we helped the others […]; we sacrificed everything for the others”’
(Gibian 1991: 17).
Whilst carrying resonances of Dostoevsky’s Christian outlook,
Makine’s writing reflects the simultaneously self-lamenting, self-glorifying
and anti-western discourse of the post-Communist era which has seen the
myth of the Second World War enlisted in political campaigns with the
aim of reminding the Russians of their former greatness and thus consoli-
dating a sense of national solidarity. Not only does the novelist mytholo-
gize the victory over Hitler, but he also depicts the war as a fatal
consequence of Russia’s precarious geopolitical position between two hos-
tile entities – Europe and Asia – from which, as it is also generally believed
in today’s Russia (Duncan 2006: 147), it must protect its own territory as
well as the whole of humanity. In Au Temps du fleuve Amour (1996), for
example, Russia is portrayed as doomed to endless warfare and cultural
backwardness, the latter being conveyed with the image of the third class
in the Trans-Siberian Express. Positioned at the rear of the train, these car-
riages are overcrowded, smell of rancid food and resonate with the ageless
Chinaman’s telescopic or, to use Russian imagery, matrioshka-like narra-
tive composed of tales of gratuitous cruelty, stupidity, drunkenness and
misery.12 Whilst Russia is a place ‘where everything was fortuitous and
fatal at the same time, where death and pain were accepted with the resig-
nation and indifference of the grass of the steppe’ (Makine 1996b: 89), the
West, ‘which had once set itself disdainfully apart from barbarian Muscovy’,
182 Helena Duffy

is symbolized by the comfortable and elegant first class of the Express

(Makine 1996b: 22). The train’s vacillating movement, whose inner split
mirrors the traditional opposition between westernizers and Slavophiles,
replicates that of Russia’s history, which Makine retells as a series of
military conflicts:
Since the beginning of the century, history, like a deadly pendulum, began to
sweep the Empire in a massive to-and-fro movement. Men would leave,
women would dress in black. The pendulum would measure time: the war
against Japan, the war against Germany, the Revolution, the Civil War… And
once again, but in reverse order: the war against the Germans, the war
against the Japanese. And the men would leave, here covering twelve thou-
sand kilometres to fill the trenches in the west, there to lose themselves in
the misty void of the eastern ocean.
(Makine 1996b: 22)
In La Musique d’une vie (2001), which opens with the image of a human
mass congealed in an endless wait for a train, Makine again posits wars as
defining moments in Russia’s history, this time additionally using war
imagery to describe his compatriots’ life in times of peace. Whilst compar-
ing the waiting hall to ‘a battlefield covered with corpses’ (Makine 2001: 13)
and the snowstorm raging outside to artillery fire (Makine 2001: 17), the
narrator applauds the Russians’ instant readiness for war:
[I]f suddenly the steely voice coming through the loudspeaker announced
the outbreak of war, this whole human mass would shudder into action,
ready to live this war as a matter of course, ready to suffer, to sacrifice itself,
with a totally natural acceptance of hunger, of death or of life in the muck of
this station, in the cold plains which stretch beyond the railway tracks.
(Makine 2001: 21)
He once again blames the Russians’ servile obedience of authority and the
resignation with which they accept their fate on their country’s geogra-
phy, climate, history and, implicitly, western malevolence.
[L]ife in these little towns located a thousand miles from civilization is made
up of waiting, resignation and damp warmth inside one’s boots. And this
station besieged by the storm is nothing other than a summary of the coun-
try’s history. That is its fundamental nature. These spaces that render absurd
any attempt at action.
(Makine 2001: 19)
Indeed, the journeys available to Russians on the axis of time are not only
entirely predetermined but also brief. This is illustrated by the Madonna-
like young woman, destined to lose her husband to war and, consequently,
move from innocence to illicit sexuality. Her future self is the prostitute
who, although her mobility is severely curtailed, haunts the station’s plat-
forms, studying departure and arrival times. Likewise, the fate of the virile
soldier is foretold in the figure of the impoverished war veteran ‘who must
have been through the empire’s two great wars, survived repressions and
13. Like his narrators, famines, and who does not even believe he has deserved any better than
Makine was allegedly this makeshift bed on a floor covered with spit and cigarette butts’ (Makine
brought up in an
orphanage. 2001: 21).
Thus zooming in on the supposedly homogenous community, the nar-
14. I discuss the theme
of melancholia in rator vehemently opposes the western view of Russia as ‘Evil Empire’ or
Makine’s work in ‘barbarity with a human face’, or Alexander Zinovev’s (1982) term homo
‘L’Écrivain ne se sovieticus that designates a spiritually bankrupt materialist who partici-
meurt pas ou la
Résurrection comme pates in the Soviet state power and conquests, who slavishly obeys the
triomphe sur la nomenklatura and willingly collaborates with the KGB (Makine 2001: 8).
mélancolie dans Although two of his protagonists are secret agents, Makine denies the
l’œuvre d’Andreï
Makine’ to be Russians’ active involvement with the regime, instead insisting on their
published by the helplessness engendered by a conflation of adverse historically and geo-
University of graphically contingent circumstances. He thus reiterates his compatriots’
Amsterdam Press
in 2008 in Écrivains victim status but also, by repeatedly invoking the myth of the Second
franco-russes edited World War, strives to rebuild – at least on a symbolic level – an entity
by Murielle Lucie eclipsed by political and consequently sociocultural changes.
Clément.
Reconstructing the body

Endorsing Roland Barthes’s view of literary production as driven by a quest
for one’s origins – ‘Is not story-telling always a search for one’s origins, a
narrative of one’s dealings with the Law, one’s entry into the dialectic of
tender love and hate?’ (Barthes 1973: 75–76) – Makine’s novels are usu-
ally narrated by orphans who fruitlessly pursue elusive parental figures.
The acute sense of loss permeating Makine’s work may of course be seen in
narrowly biographical terms,13 or else can be interpreted as symptomatic of
Russia’s ‘historical orphanhood’ with which the author explains his home-
land’s cultural specificity: unlike western European cultures that have been
nourished by Graeco-Roman heritage, Russia had nothing to draw upon
apart from its vast and largely unwelcoming territory. Finally, the protago-
nists’ loss may be read as proceeding not so much from the death of their
parents as from their separation from Mother Russia.
It would be a mistake to assume that Makine’s narrators move to
France in search of a better quality of life or, as it may be suggested in rela-
tion to Le Testament français, as ardent Francophiles eager to live out their
youthful passion for the French language and culture. Nor are they dissi-
dents and although Aliocha does work for Radio Free Europe, it is largely
because the station’s existence reassures him about Russia’s enduring
importance; signifying his homeland’s defeat in the Cold War, its closure,
on the contrary, renders him melancholy to the point of making him suici-
dal.14 Like the narrator of Requiem pour l’Est, forced into exile by the juxta-
position of an old beggar, whose medal-decorated chest testifies to his
fearless conduct in the Second World War, and a group of ‘vulgar big
spenders and their sluts crammed into designer clothes’ (Makine 2001: 94),
Aliocha is revolted by the nouveaux Russes who, like Alex Bond (in reality
Alexeï Bondartchenko), claim to express themselves better in English than
in Russian. It is therefore to escape the sorry spectacle of the Soviet
Union’s collapse, on the one hand and, on the other hand, to rediscover in
a France, ‘which had once been resplendent in all four corners of the
world’, the imperial Russia that Aliocha emigrates (Makine 1997: 299). The
sensation of homecoming is, nevertheless, ephemeral, as the France that
184 Helena Duffy

on the map scrutinized by Ivan Demidov lent its colour to a large part of
the world, as did in fact the Soviet Union, has ceased to exist whilst the
process of colonization has been reversed through the influx of immi-
grants. This is suggested by the demolition site outside Aliocha’s window
and the protagonist’s encounter with an African clochard who emerges out
of a hieroglyph-covered cardboard box mumbling in an incomprehensible
tongue. Aliocha’s imagination then transforms Paris into a metropolis
destined for an apocalyptic end. The few cars that haunt the nocturnal
capital seem to be fleeing the doomed city whose streets all slope down
towards the river and whose buildings resemble ‘the monuments of an
abandoned city’ (Makine 1997: 305). The date ‘January 1900’ engraved
in commemoration of a deluge on a wall against which the protagonist is
leaning becomes prophetic when the city indeed falls to pieces: ‘the wall
was giving way under my palm, the windows dripped down the pale
façades of buildings’ (Makine 1997: 306).
Penniless, homeless and struck by an undiagnosed illness, the protago-
nist places his martyred body in a grave and, spreading his arms like Jesus
on the cross, becomes a Christ who will rise to rescue France from the
onslaught of American-imported commercialism and popular culture. The
constricted space of the tomb becomes a uterus from which Aliocha will
be reborn to two illustrious families on whose remains he has been resting
and whose members include highly ranked army officers, a woman of letters
and a historical painter who accompanied the French Army on its colonial
exploits to Africa, Italy, Syria and Mexico (Makine 1997: 304–05). To resur-
rect both their world and the Soviet Union of his youth, the protagonist, who
in the meantime has adopted Proust as his literary forebear, sets out to nar-
rate a story of the peaceful rayonnement of French culture through a woman
born in Neuilly during the belle époque but who spent most of her life in
Soviet Russia and whom Aliocha (erroneously) takes for his grandmother.
The theme of resurrection has been prominent in Makine’s oeuvre since
his very first novel whose main character, gravely injured in battle and then
locked for four days in a coma, is reborn as a hero in order to testify with
his young, healthy and, foremostly, intact body to Russia’s victory over fas-
cism. Significantly, Ivan is restored to life by a nurse – a maternal figure in
Makine’s prose – who places a mirror against soldiers’ lips to see if they are
still breathing. The mirror, which also plays an important role in Alexeï
Berg’s renewal of identity (Makine 2001), invites a Lacanian reading of this
formative rite of passage for several of Makine’s protagonists. Given that for
Lacan the specular image (or the image of, for example, the mother with
whom the child identifies) has the power to gather the bits and pieces that
constitute the infant’s pre-mirror-stage body image into a unified entity, the
mirror featured in Alexeï’s and Ivan’s stories suggests not only their
(re-)individuation as subjects which paves the way for their alienation from
themselves as objects, but also their triumph over the figurative castration
that invokes Freud’s reading of Christianity as the dead Son’s victory over the
Father (Freud 1955b: part 6). In the light of Lacan’s interpretation of the
fantasies or dreams of ‘castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation,
evisceration, devouring [and] bursting open of the body’ as well as of prac-
tices of tattooing, incision or circumcision as a regression to the pre-mirror
stage (Lacan 1977: 11), the omnipresence of morselized bodies in Makine’s
prose points to the narrators’ longing for the primordial union with the
maternal object within the semiotic, as theorized by Kristeva.
A Lacanian reading of the two texts is further supported by Makine’s
representation of his protagonists as newborn babies. Recovering in a hos-
pital that used to be a school, Ivan contemplates the portrait of Darwin and
the map of the world which suggest his progression from the circle of the
Innenwelt into the Umwelt (Lacan 1977: 4), and his newly acquired position
as a subject in both space and time, for the reference to Darwin implies, to
follow Foucault’s elaboration of Nietzsche’s notion of Herkunft (Foucault
1994b: 142), Ivan’s recognition of himself as a historical construct, a body
bearing an imprint of its origins. A little later in the text Ivan finds himself
once again confronted by his reflection, this time found in a pool of water in
a forest clearing. Whilst having maternal connotations and ego-building
potential – ‘It is me… – words were slowly taking shape in his head – I,
Ivan Demidov…’ (Makine 1996a: 29) – Ivan’s encounter with his image
also grants him a narcissistic pleasure, defending him against the very
aggressivity which, according to Lacan, produces figures of disintegration.
When recuperating from a fracture to his skull the protagonist of La
Musique d’une vie also studies his specular image. The scar that runs down
his face conveys his split identity (to avoid persecutions Alexeï assumes a
dead soldier’s name) whilst the shaven head and the ageless looks signify
his symbolic return to infancy. The doctor ‘was speaking to him the way
one speaks to a child trying to grasp the hand of the mother who is obliged
to go’ and indeed soon after leaving the hospital Andreï finds a maternal
figure in a woman who has just lost her baby (Makine 2001: 79).
Following the tiny coffin that the woman pulls on a sleigh towards the
cemetery, Alexeï imagines himself inside the wooden box before collapsing
on top of the child’s grave. His recovery, which precedes his return to the
front line where he may once again be wounded or even die, is marked by
his alienation from himself, his environment and, finally, his maternal
lover: ‘in astonishment, he was feeling more and more separate from the
wind, the earth, the cold into which he had nearly melted. […] He was an
other’ (Makine 2001: 83).
Conclusions
The same dialectical movement from splitting to wholeness structures Le
Crime d’Olga Arbélina (1998), a story of a Russian princess exiled in France
who gradually metamorphoses from a castratrix into a phallic mother
simultaneously remodelling her surroundings in the image of the recently
obliterated Tsarist Russia. Although an analysis of this novel, set outside
the context of war, is beyond the scope of this article, its use of emascula-
tion as a trope for Russia’s disintegration supports my present discussion
of those of Makine’s narratives that deal with armed conflicts. Like the
mirror that reassembles the bodies of Alexeï or Ivan, or the self-generated
images that by awarding Olga auto-erotic pleasure tease her body out
of the ante-chamber of death, Makine’s texts, whose deliberate realism
backtracks on the destabilizing effects of the nouveau roman and which are
preoccupied with the Soviet Union in its golden hour, are meant to offer a
totalizing picture of a fragmented entity. However, just like the seemingly
consoling image that the Lacanian mirror returns to the ‘prematurely
186 Helena Duffy

born’ infant, promising it a future autonomy and mobility, by using the

samovar and other images of wounding and dismemberment to stir up
nostalgia for a glorious past, the body of Makine’s oeuvre only lures and
deludes both the Russian narrator and the western reader.
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Zinoviev, A. (1982), Homo soviéticus, Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme.
Suggested citation
Duffy, H. (2008), ‘The veteran’s wounded body before the mirror: the dialectic
of wholeness and disintegration in Andreï Makine’s prose’, Journal of War
and Culture Studies 1: 2, pp. 175–188, doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.175/1
Contributor details
Helena Duffy lectures in French language, literature and cinema at the University
of New England. Prior to that she taught in higher and further education institu-
tions in both the United Kingdom and Australia. Her research interests lie with
contemporary French literature, focusing on the prose of non-native French
authors. She has published on the work of Milan Kundera, Rodica Iulian, . Andreï
Makine and, most recently, the Polish-born film director Andrzej Zuíawski.
Contact: Dr Helena Duffy, University of New England, School of Arts, Armidale,
NSW 2350, Australia E11 210.
E-mail: helena.duffy@une.edu.au
188 Helena Duffy

JWCS_1.2_06_art_Vassallo.qxd 2/28/08 4:41 PM Page 189
Embodied memory: war and the

remembrance of wounds in Nina
Helen Vassallo University of Exeter
Abstract Keywords
This article presents an analysis of two autobiographical texts by Franco-Algerian embodiment
women writers, Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (Tomboy) and Leïla Sebbar’s memory
Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil (Paris Letters: Autopsy of an Exile), within war
a critical framework of perspectives on war and violence. The central premise of wound
the argument is an investigation of the female body as a locus or carrier of trauma violence
caused by memories of war. This is analysed with close reference to the primary Nina Bouraoui
texts, to highlight key concepts of embodied memory and the notion of wounds Leïla Sebbar
as transmitted psychological trauma rather than the infliction of physical vio-
lence. At all junctures, the analysis is underpinned by social theories of war and
mourning, violence and atrocity, and the body in pain, in order to argue for these
texts as transmitted legacy, rather than direct testimony, of war and wounding.
Embodied memory
This article seeks to identify how conflict and trauma are interconnected 1. All translations are
in Nina Bouraoui’s Tomboy and Leïla Sebbar’s Paris Letters: Autopsy of an my own.
Exile, by examining the extent to which these texts exemplify Bouraoui’s
claim regarding embodiment of historical memory that ‘Algeria is not in
my language. She is in my body. Algeria is not in my words. She is within
me. Algeria is not in what comes out. She is in what devours’ (Bouraoui
2000: 167).1 The analysis will show how the physical internalizing of
‘Algeria’, and of the war of independence symbolized by this, needs a ver-
bal externalization (the life narrative) in order to be overcome. The pri-
mary objective, therefore, is to determine the extent to which memories of
the Algerian war can be likened to wounds on the body of these second-
generation North African writers, and the autobiographical narratives to
the resultant textual ‘healing’ of this embodied memory. Using contempo-
rary perspectives on war and pain to open up these narratives, I will argue
for them as texts that negotiate, and attempt to exorcize, an embodied
trauma generated by the memory and legacy of war. To this end, Elaine
Scarry’s work on the body in pain and the body as voice (1985) opens up
questions about the female body not only as a site of internalized conflict
and suffering, but also as a vessel in which trauma is processed, thence to
be externalized through literary creation. Judith Butler’s recent text
(2004) on mourning and violence is used to show how memories of war
are inscribed as ‘wounds’, and Michael Humphrey’s writing on the politics

2. I employ the term of atrocity (2002) situates the personal story within a more collective
‘violence’ more socio-historical context.
frequently than the
term ‘war’, because of Both Bouraoui and Sebbar are half Algerian and half French, and so a
my critical position significant legacy of war and violence is an essential part of their heritage,
regarding war as as their blood mixes both colonizer and colonized, perpetrator and victim
‘embodied memory’
in these texts – an of violence: Sebbar writes of ‘the violence of existing against and else-
inflicted violence where’ (Sebbar and Huston 1986: 79), Bouraoui explains that ‘this is how
rather than an I live our Algerian story. In combat’ (Bouraoui 2000: 62), and both not
experienced conflict.
I justify my only corroborate, but also incarnate, Benjamin Stora’s claim that ‘Franco-
interchanging of the Algerian relations are rooted in violence’ (Stora 1991: 317).2 This division
two terms by referring marks their autobiographical writing, is an inescapable characteristic of it:
to Elaine Scarry’s
contention that ‘[war] ‘I am indefinite. […] I become uncategorizable. I am not typical enough.
is a form of violence; “You’re not an Arab like the others.” I am too typical. “You’re not
it is a member of a French”’ (Bouraoui 2000: 33); ‘I stand at the crossroads, in a state of con-
class of occurrences
whose activity is stant unsteadiness, for fear of madness and of repudiation if I cross over to
“injuring”’ (Scarry one side or the other’ (Sebbar and Huston 1986: 199). In addition to the
1985: 63). ‘fractured identity’ that their dual nationality instils, and their decision to
3. ‘Here I am a foreigner. live their adult lives in France and to write in French (along with a poor
Here I am nothing. command of Arabic), Bouraoui and Sebbar also share common points in
France forgets me.
Algeria does not their writing: broadly speaking, their literary corpus is marked by memo-
recognize me’ ries of violence, separation and war. More specifically, they write of a sense
(Bouraoui 2000: 29); of exile, or of not belonging, and of a desire to reclaim their Algerian
‘Nothing, I know, will
take away or abolish homeland emotionally (as it had been done politically).3 I will argue that
that first essential questions of identity, exile and dislocation, and the violence with which
rupture: my father is these are inscribed on the authorial body – and consequently on the nar-
Arab, my mother is
French’ (Sebbar and rative voice – are in turn inseparable from the text. So, these authors suf-
Huston 1986: 199). fer a dual difficulty: first, they must find their voice, and second, they must
4. This can also be make it heard. As Michael Humphrey explains, ‘[f]or the victim, pain is dif-
seen as a broader ficult to communicate – traumatic experience is not easily recovered whole –
endeavour in the and they may fear retribution or re-victimization for speaking out’
literary production
of Sebbar and of Assia (Humphrey 2002: 107). Hence, we see that it is important that women be
Djebar, with Sebbar’s allowed to use their own words to tell their story, or to tell a collective
edited collection Une story, or to tell a retrospective story whose repercussions reach into their
Enfance Algérienne
(An Algerian own life.4 The imbrication of personal and political exemplifies Judith
Childhood), 1997 Butler’s claim that
and Djebar’s novel
L’Amour, la fantasia
(Fantasia: An Algerian [c]onstituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is
Cavalcade), 1995. not mine. Given over from the start of the world to others, it bears their
imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some
uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do.
(Butler 2004: 26)
These women’s bodily experience bears the imprint of that undergone by a

previous generation of women who were unable to articulate their suffer-
ing and trauma. Because of the silence surrounding the war, the legacy is
itself one of silence, through which the atrocities of war live on and haunt
following generations. Survivors are thus
haunted by the past with their private memory unable to be assimilated into
public memory. Consequently, their experience cannot be commemorated,
190 Helen Vassallo

preventing them from reconstructing the self through narration. Instead, 5. Bouraoui’s comment
the mnemonic of violence leaves the mark of repression buried in the indi- evokes the taboo
union of her French
vidual; through terror and trauma the victim is silenced. mother and Algerian
(Humphrey 2002: 94) father – which is also
Sebbar’s family
heritage – indicating
Because there is such limited private testimony of those years, and in par- the significance of the
ticular an absence of female testimony, the public memory silences the division of war that is
experience of women, meaning that the legacy handed down is one in embodied in her, as
an offspring of the
which the self remains unreconstructed. I contend, then, that these opposing sides.
women are also victims of the atrocities of war, even if this was not directly
experienced by them, because they still conform to Humphrey’s definition
of the victim of atrocity as ‘the one who embodies the violence of the past
in their memory and suffering’ (Humphrey 2002: 144). This sense of
unreconstructed self is what the following generation of women inherit,
and in a developing world in which narratives of the self abound, and in
which women’s voices are beginning to be heard in the literary canon and
the public domain, it is this generation of women who write to exorcize the
demons of war that are transmitted to them through the embodied mem-
ory of the survivors: as Bouraoui explains, ‘I am in the Algerian war.
I carry the conflict’ (Bouraoui 2000: 31). Bouraoui’s use of the verb
‘carry’ ( porter) indicates the importance of the embodiment of historical
memory, and so it is through the body of the next generation, the ‘daugh-
ter[s] of the lovers of 1960’ (Bouraoui 2000: 124), that the trauma and
memory are processed.5 Aside from these ideological or intellectual claims,
there are also very practical reasons for the primarily retrospective consid-
eration of the war in my analysis: when the war of independence broke out
in 1954, only 4.5 per cent of Algerian women could read and write
(Amrane 1994: 12). Therefore, the generation of women who actually
witnessed the war or participated in it have been unable to bear witness to
it other than orally. (Amrane has published interviews with women who
were ‘maquisardes’ – members of the Resistance – during the war, which
goes some way to giving them a voice, but they will still be unlikely to
write more widely distributed works of literature from this.)
As Mohammed Hirchi opines, ‘to write is to reveal all that is buried in
the depths of what is forgotten or what has not yet been thought’ (Hirchi
2003: 92). One of the significant problems in making these narratives
heard is that before the issue of the silenced female subject arises, there is
the more general question of the silence that surrounds the Algerian war
itself. As Humphrey asserts,
[t]he Algerian war for national independence […] has remained a forgotten
war in France. Despite the more than a thousand ‘narratives of personal expe-
rience’, there is no collective work of remembrance of the French defeat. In
France the Algerian War, the ‘dirty’ colonial war that was lost, was ignored in
favour of the good and noble war that was won (the Second World War).
(Humphrey 2002: 54)
Similarly, Alec Hargreaves and Mark McKinney claim that ‘memories of the
Algerian war in France are both repressed and omnipresent’ (Hargreaves and
McKinney 1997: 18), and John Talbott’s critical work The War Without a Name
Embodied memory: war and the remembrance of wounds in Nina Bouraoui … 191
(Talbott 1981) indicates explicitly the silence and silencing surrounding the
Algerian war. So we see that the ‘war without a name’ is rarely spoken of
even in France, as there is at work a conscious forgetting of this ignominious
political debacle, described by Stora as a ‘gangrenous’ deliberate forgetting
or ‘amnesia’ (Stora 1991: 318), a whitewashing of truth by using
euphemistic terms such as ‘the Algerian drama’ to avoid referring to it as a
war, with all the implications of casualty, sacrifice and wounding that this
would carry (Stora 1991: 13). This makes it increasingly important to keep
memories alive – indeed, Stora claims that ‘it is time to bring into play new
books on the Algerian war: from its colonial beginnings to its survival in the
memories of the present’ (Stora 1991: 321, my emphasis), but what I want to
suggest is that for as long as these stories or memories are transmitted in a
negative way – that is to say that legacies of oppression or victimization are
transmitted from one generation to the next – this second generation of
North African women is affected by events they may not have experienced
themselves. Therefore, they must become the vessel for the reclaiming of
memory and the positive healing from the wounds of the past, via their
embodiment of the ‘memories of the present’. As Sebbar elucidates, there is a
need to ‘stitch up, with words, the rent between France and Algeria’ (Sebbar
2005). These narratives, then, fall into an emergent literary or cultural
practice of giving voice to silenced historical wounds, evident in the work of
female contemporaries of Sebbar and Bouraoui, such as Assia Djebar, who
describes one of her projects thus:
My action […] was aimed at allowing women – women who did not have the
right to be seen – to see themselves. The mirror effect is practically impossi-
ble in an Islamic society which conceals women, and which thus blinds
them, to themselves in the first instance, alas!
(Djebar and Salhi 1999: 177)
I contend that Bouraoui and Sebbar make a different – though no less

crucial – contribution to this ideology: through their refusal to ‘forget’ or to
‘erase’ memories of war and, via their corporeal embodiment of the traumas
that these memories entail, they open up the brutally silenced North African
female voice and the veiled female body to be heard and seen, though not as
an object of a patriarchal gaze but rather as an agent of her own subjectivity,
finding a voice to articulate this imposed violence on her own terms, and
fighting against the effects of violence described by Humphrey as ‘reduc[ing]
the victim from subject to abject object’ (Humphrey 2002: 12). The autobio-
graphical narrative then becomes a means of negotiating this transition
from object to subject. As Sebbar explains, ‘if I had known Arabic, my
father’s language, the language of the native, known how to speak it, to read
it, to write it… I would not have written’ (Sebbar and Huston 1986: 19,
original emphasis). Writing thus becomes a means of asserting identity out-
side the restricted parameters imposed on the female subject, particularly
the subject with dual identity, in whom memories of war are embodied.
The texts under examination here are not intended to be testaments or
historical documents about the Algerian war. Representations of the war in
historical contexts have tended to focus on traditionally masculine domains:
warfare, politics, patriotism. Indeed, war in general is seen to be a masculine
192 Helen Vassallo

endeavour, as Susan Sontag comments sweepingly – though not without 6. Sontag is

paraphrasing Virgina
irony – in her assertion that ‘[m]en make war. Men (most men) like war, Woolf ’s 1938 text
since for men there is “some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fight- Three Guineas.
ing” that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy’ (Sontag 2003: 3).6 This
7. Equally, there is a
suggests that women are the passive victims of war, rather than active par- growing interest, in
ticipants in it. Although it is beyond the scope of the present study to con- both francophone and
sider the importance of gender politics in war, nonetheless the analysis is anglophone contexts,
in women and the
inflected with an awareness of, and a sensitivity towards, the interstices writing of trauma,
between studies of war and/or memory, and contemporary perspectives on evidenced in the
gender and trauma. There exists within francophone studies work on publication of texts
such as Suzette
women and conflict in a literary and historical context, such as Frédérique Henke’s Shattered
Chevillot and Anna Norris’s edited collection Les Femmes écrivent la guerre Subjects: Trauma
(Women Write on War) (2006), Djamila Amrane’s Les Femmes algériennes and Testimony in
Women’s Life Writing
dans la guerre (Algerian Women at War) (1991) and Des Femmes dans la (2000), and Kathryn
guerre d’Algérie (Women in the Algerian War) (1994), and Claire Gorrara’s Robson’s Writing
Women’s Representations of the Occupation in post-’68 France (1998).7 However, Wounds: the Inscription
of Trauma in post-1968
in 1999 Sebbar questioned ‘what do women know of war?’ (Sebbar 1999: French Women’s Life
67), and this article seeks to negotiate a response to Sebbar’s question not by Writing (2004).
documenting the participation of women in war, but by analysing the effect
that war has on them when embodied as memory or legacy.
Memory, legacy and war

Although these writers did not directly experience the violence of war, in
order to argue for its importance in their life narrative, I turn to Humphrey’s
definition of violence: ‘Pain is the bodily feeling produced by violence, political
power is the source of violence, and suffering is the legacy of violence remaining
as a memory in individual bodies’ (Humphrey 2002: 1, my emphasis). I do not
interpret Humphrey’s assertion of pain as bodily feeling being purely
restricted to the physical, but understand it in a more open-ended sense of
physical or psychological trauma (trauma itself being, of course, a word origi-
nally meaning wound, and consequently implying the importance of a physi-
cal embodiment of the legacy of war). Humphrey claims that political power is
the source of violence, and I would also interpret this more openly as not just
governmental power but also social acceptance of repressive regimes or
norms. Finally, Humphrey’s assertion, which I have italicized, that ‘suffering
is the legacy of violence remaining as a memory in individual bodies’ clarifies
my position: these authors write of a transmitted trauma, a violence which is
not physical, but psychological and social. Therefore, I propose that the mem-
ory of violence is not restricted to the person or people who have directly suf-
fered from the violence, but can also be embodied in later generations: as
Bouraoui writes, ‘here we are nothing. French by our mother. Algerian by
our father. Only our bodies reunite the opposing lands’ (Bouraoui 2000: 8).
The transmitted trauma is also evident in Sebbar’s claim that
I am not an immigrant, I am not a beur, I am simply in exile, a gilded exile

admittedly, but an exile from the country which is my father’s land and
which I remember, while I live in a country which is my mother’s land, the
country of my language, of my work, of my children, but in which I do not
find my own land…
(Sebbar and Huston 1986: 133)
Therefore, while these authors do not write explicitly about the war in any
historical way, we can see the way in which the legacy of the conflict, and
the opposition between French and Algerian, is not only part of their her-
itage, but also literally inhabiting their body in the mixed blood they carry.
Both thus incarnate Bouraoui’s description of the Algerian land as ‘a frag-
ile land, a land beaten down by hate, a land dried up’ (Bouraoui 2000:
135), their bodies taking on the contours of the territories ravaged by war.
This reverses Elaine Scarry’s claim that ‘[w]ar is relentless in taking for its
own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open
human body’ (Scarry 1985: 81) by revealing the interior of the body to be
inhabited by the content of war. Their divided nationality is a significant
cause of social ‘othering’: the union of French mother and Algerian father
bore the stigma of taboo, and the inability to forget what this symbolizes is
incarnated in their own body, as Bouraoui elucidates: ‘For a long time
I will carry in me my mother’s childhood. Like a heritage. Like a wound to
erase with my happy life. […] For a long time I will carry it to soothe my
mother. To heal her. […] For a long time I will take on her fears’ (Bouraoui
2000: 114, my emphasis). The repetition of the verb ‘to carry’ ( porter), as
well as the use of ‘to take on’ ( prendre), indicates the way in which trauma
is carried through generations. Similarly, the vocabulary of pain (‘a wound’,
‘to heal’) highlights the importance of the physical embodiment of this
traumatic memory.
The separation and conflict in the social and familial heritage of
Bouraoui and Sebbar is a transmitted memory stemming from the war
and which is embodied by the authors, both of whom exemplify Humphrey’s
claim that
[t]he political opportunity of pain arises from the instability of communica-

tion that allows the objectification of pain and appropriation of its meaning
by others. This may occur at the moment of violence or later, in the legacy of
the victim’s suffering.
(Humphrey 2002: 2)
It is precisely this notion of legacy that they embody: a violence or trauma

transmitted to, or indeed appropriated by, others. As Bouraoui notes,
For a long time I think I am carrying a fault. I come from the war. I come
from a contested marriage. I carry the suffering of my Algerian family.
I carry the refusal of my French family. I carry these transmissions. The
violence remains within me. It inhabits me. It comes from inside me.
(Bouraoui 2000: 32)
Here, the violence comes from the legacy of war (‘I come from the war’)
that is carried in the narrator’s body (‘I carry these transmissions’). We
see from this further repetition of the verb ‘carry’ ( porter) how guilt,
suffering and rejection are embodied in the author/narrator, and her
poignant claim that ‘I come from the war’ indicates the historical
dimension of this suffering, inscribed on her body (‘the violence
remains within me. It inhabits me’). This is corroborated by Sebbar,
who reflects that
194 Helen Vassallo

The children of immigration will enact violence on France just as she 8. The French ‘histoire’
enacted violence on their fathers both here and over there. They have no can mean both
collective history and
memory but they do not forget, I think. With France they will have a relation- personal story, an
ship of love mixed with hate, fearful and often deadly. imbrication that is
(Sebbar and Huston 1986: 62) key to my argument.
The war is presented as an inescapable legacy, even though the generation

of which Sebbar writes has no conscious memory of the war itself. Indeed,
the only way in which it appears to be possible to exorcize this pain is by
internalizing the violence and using it as an arm against this memory, to
appropriate it and to redefine or reinscribe it. The incorporation or inter-
nalization of this memory of conflict is demonstrated by Sebbar’s need to
keep remembering: ‘This silence of exile … for me it is necessary, at every
moment, if I don’t want to die […] to discover or to invent a story/history’
(Sebbar and Huston 1986: 97).8 Similarly, Bouraoui aligns her personal
situation with the history of violence in Algeria, in her lament regarding a
French ticket controller that ‘He will never know anything of the women
whose throats were slit, of the children who were burned, of the stomachs
ripped open, of the eyes gouged out. No, he will never know anything of
that. Just as he will never know anything of me’ (Bouraoui 2000: 67).
Hence, it is not only a question of silence surrounding the ‘war with no
name’, but also of the transmission of this silence, and its consequent
internalization by future generations.
Silence and the embodiment of trauma

As Hirchi explains, ‘Once the difficulty has been localized and its origin
identified, the writer begins to confront a double silence: his or her own,
and that of those who have no voice’ (Hirchi 2003: 94). Hence, we see
that individual repression – in this case, the silencing of the female subject
(which can be both violent and traumatic) – is irrevocably linked to the
collective repression of the marginalized group of subjects with which the
author identifies. Sebbar claims of her writing project that
I write on silence, a blank memory, a history in fragments, a community dis-

persed, shattered, divided forever, I write on the fragment, on the emptiness,
a poor land, uncultivated, sterile, where one must dig deep and far to bring
to light what would have been forgotten forever.
(Sebbar and Huston 1986: 160 –61)
We can see from this that although she has no direct memory of the war
(‘a blank memory’), nonetheless the ‘community dispersed, shattered,
divided forever’ inflects her writing because of her need to ‘bring to light’
this memory, which is part of her history. Whereas Sebbar appears to be
writing in order to find herself, allying herself to the ‘history in fragments’
in order to situate herself within a history that is deliberately silenced,
Bouraoui says of her autobiographical project that ‘I write. And someone
will recognize themselves’, thereby suggesting that the mode of collectivity
that she seeks is for other silenced subjects to recognize their story in hers.
In both cases, the author is reaching out to a wider community in a quest
not simply for identity, but for identification. Although these texts are
9. Frank writes autobiographical – and thus necessarily subjective – there is also an

specifically of illness implicit sense of collectivity. Therefore, they reflect Humphrey’s reasoning
narratives resulting
from physical pain, that this individual memory becomes political: the embodied memory
but I propose that gives way to voice, and the articulation of inflicted violence – whether
his hypotheses are physical or psychological – becomes a political statement, the personal
equally applicable
to the physical story intertwined with a collective history. This is apparent in Bouraoui’s
embodiment of claim that
traumatic memory.
See Vassallo (2007)
for a more detailed I remain with my mother. I remain with my father. I take from both of them.
discussion of this I lose from both of them. Each part melts into the other and then detaches.
argument. They embrace one another and fight one another. It is a war.
(Bouraoui 2000: 20)
and Sebbar’s that I ‘reveal myself to myself in this loss, this mourning for
the country of my birth, for an obvious and simple land that I would have
inherited and that I would only have to transmit’ (Sebbar and Huston
1986: 129). Bouraoui’s simple assertion that ‘it is a war’, and Sebbar’s ref-
erence to the ‘country of my birth […] that I would have inherited’
demonstrate that they are unable to escape from their history, which, as
Bouraoui explains, is inseparable from the war and the union of colonizer
and colonized that their mixed blood represents: ‘I come from a rare
union. I am France and Algeria together’ (Bouraoui 2000: 9); ‘The danger
is within us. It lies beneath our skin. […] It is in the lack of a country.
It comes from separation’ (Bouraoui 2000: 35). The importance of legacy,
or of the inscription of memory ‘beneath the skin’, is also primordial, and
these narratives of the self illustrate Butler’s claim that ‘I am not fully
known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of oth-
ers’ (Butler 2004: 46). If it is by understanding our past that we can come
to terms with our own experience, then before these writers can look for-
wards to a future in which they might establish their own identity free
from the legacy of the past, they must first look backwards in order to
come to terms with the traces of violence and trauma that have been
passed on to them, and which they have themselves embodied.
Corroborating Arthur Frank’s claim that ‘women’s enemy is silence’
(Frank 1995: 121),9 Bouraoui evokes specifically the notion of silence as
an illness or wound: ‘But silence will take hold of everything. Silence about
the massacres in Algeria. About the pain. About our new life. A silence
which spreads. Which is contagious. A real illness. A plague. An epidemic.
Silence on everyone’s lips’ (Bouraoui 2000: 115). By likening her own
silencing to the taboo surrounding the complex socio-historical situation
in Algeria, Bouraoui not only asserts the importance of the personal as
political, but also highlights the transmission of silence in her immediate
family – itself intrinsically linked to the precarious political situation – as a
significant cause of her trauma. That is to say that silence can be equated
with a refusal to remember, or to acknowledge painful truth. As such, we
might suggest that it is not memory in itself that is at the root of trauma,
but more precisely an inability to face memory, or to acknowledge it, or to
own it in the reclaiming of self via the body. Moreover, Bouraoui’s descrip-
tion of the silence as contagious, and as ‘a real illness’, underlines the
inscription of social malaise on the body, manifest as physical disease.
196 Helen Vassallo

Sebbar outlines a similar desire not to lose this memory, acknowledging

that, although painful, it is essential to her identity and to her sense of
‘healing’: ‘finally I am no longer losing my memory, as I have been doing
over so many years. And so I hoard it up by transporting this memory, so
as not to lose it in fiction’ (Sebbar and Huston 1986: 98). The authors
reverse the notion of memory as illness or trauma, citing the importance
of accepting and processing the transmitted memory, and thus accepting
themselves by coming to terms with the legacy that has been transmitted
to them. The wound left by this legacy of war can only be healed by recov-
ering a collective memory in order to reclaim a personal voice. This posi-
tion is elaborated by Susan Sontag’s claims regarding memories of
violence, that ‘[a]ll memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with
each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a
stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it hap-
pened’ (Sontag 2003: 76, original emphasis). While Sontag appears to be
postulating that collective memory is something that is dictated to a group
by another kind of dominant mentality, I would argue that collective mem-
ory is simply a refusal to forget atrocity, and a complicit sense of commu-
nity being forged where previously it has been denied or destroyed. It is
true that memories of atrocity are predominantly localized, in that as a
society we forget about historical atrocities that did not affect us, our fam-
ily, our community, our nation (see Sontag 2003: 32). Although this does
not directly conform to Humphrey’s position regarding the politics of
atrocity and reconciliation, I propose an opening-up of his assertions that
‘the healing – the expulsion of violence from social relationships – is
meant to occur at the same time as we remember and store it as collective
memory so we don’t forget it’ (Humphrey 2002: 108), and that this expul-
sion ‘involves the exorcism of violence as the basis for healing’ (Humphrey
2002: 118). I would suggest that it is by the very fact of re-membering
(that is to say, processing memory through the body) what has been
silenced, that the violence, or the memories of war, can be expelled. As
such, I would align my approach more closely to that of Butler, who claims
that ‘[a]lthough I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnera-
bility, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover
the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of “I”’ (Butler
2004: 31). Therefore, in these narratives, the autobiographical ‘I’ is inter-
twined with a common suffering and response to violence and the mem-
ory of war.
Conclusions: remembrance of violence, transmissions

of trauma and negotiations of healing
Butler claims that ‘women and minorities, including sexual minorities,
are, as a community, subjected to violence, exposed to its possibility, if not
its realization. This means that each of us is constituted politically in part
by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies’ (Butler 2004: 20). So
already, the women writers are vulnerable to violence because of their
gender and their social situation. The violence of transmitted memory
compounds this vulnerability and renders it a reality. I have elaborated the
importance of these specifically female testimonies, and their more collec-
tive function as well as that of personal catharsis. This is exemplified by
Bouraoui’s recognition that her personal situation is a constant reminder

of a difficult historical struggle, in her assertion that her ‘crime’ is ‘[b]eing
the daughter of the lovers of 1960. Rendering that moment eternal.
Simply by my presence. By my gaze. By my voice. By my identity. Turning
the knife in the wound. Insisting on that bad time’ (Bouraoui 2000: 124),
and by Sebbar’s acknowledgement of her opposite, but related, looking
outwards to find herself in a collective history through her ‘obsessive
attention to news items, particularly anything which has to do with vio-
lence towards children, women, and Arabs’ (Sebbar and Huston 1986:
30). While Bouraoui claims to incarnate a constant reminder of the trou-
bled history, her embodied ‘wounds’ perpetuating historical ones, Sebbar
turns to others in order to identify herself with their history, and to
reclaim a collective memory through her own refusal to forget.
Bouraoui and Sebbar both expound the importance of reclaiming
memory in order to move forward rather than simply looking back, to
effect something new for women and for the autobiographical ‘I’, and to
refuse silent acceptance of the perpetuation of this violence, whether phys-
ical or psychological. Indeed, these women writers do not posit themselves
as global spokespeople for previous generations of silenced women. This
avoidance of a naïve or self-aggrandizing self-positioning as ‘carrier’ of col-
lective trauma displays a consciousness of, or sensitivity to, Butler’s posi-
tion that ‘[t]he one with whom I identify is not me, and that “not being
me” is the condition of the identification’ (Butler 2004: 145). The impor-
tance of embodied trauma in this process of self-identification and accep-
tance is further highlighted by Frank’s assertion that
society is suppressing a truth about suffering, and that truth must be told.
These writers do not want to go back to a former state of health, which is
often viewed as a naïve illusion. They want to use suffering to move others
forward with them.
(Frank 1995: 121)
The autobiographical narrative then becomes not only a collective endeav-

our, but also a means to fight back against the inflicted trauma, as writing
becomes itself a form of combat: Bouraoui claims that ‘My silence is a
combat. I write also for that reason’ (Bouraoui 2000: 33), and Sebbar
acknowledges that ‘the act of writing is vital to me, and also constitutes a
territory […] Exile is my land of inspiration, of lyricism, of emotion, of
writing’ (Sebbar and Huston 1986: 144). Both authors testify to a need to
incarnate violence themselves in order to effect a cathartic shift away from
the memory of violence as oppression. Sebbar describes this resistance to
silent acceptance by explaining that: ‘daily life, that murderess which
throws me gently into a crushing assimilation, routine, deadly but non-
violent. So it falls to me to create violence myself, to shake myself out of
that comfortable inertia’ (Sebbar and Huston 1986: 78). Similarly,
Bouraoui says of her writing that ‘I too will have that strength. That
desire. To destroy. To leap at the throat. To denounce. To knock down
walls. It will be a keen but suppressed strength. A demon. Which will
emerge through my writing’ (Bouraoui 2000: 129). The violence assumed
by the female narrative voice suggests an instinctive or corporeal incarnation
198 Helen Vassallo

of this memory of war that has been silenced on both a historical level and
a socio-political one.
The female body thus becomes the locus of trauma because of the nar-
rative imposed on it by society and by remembrance, a narrative that
leaves a legacy of silence generated by taboo and shame, as well as an
inability to escape from the embodied memory of conflict. To return to my
initial point of departure, Bouraoui states that ‘Algeria is not in my lan-
guage. She is in my body. Algeria is not in my words. She is within me.
Algeria is not in what comes out. She is in what devours’ (Bouraoui 2000:
167). The incarnation of conflict (‘Algeria […] is in my body […] She is
within me’) needs to be reversed, and articulated, precisely so that it can be
with language, and with words, that Bouraoui and Sebbar avoid being
consumed by memories of war (‘She is in what devours’), instead external-
izing their trauma into ‘what comes out’, and thereby overcoming the
legacy of embodied trauma that has been passed down to them as a her-
itage of war. Therefore, Bouraoui and Sebbar must find their own narra-
tive in order to heal – which is not to forget, but rather to reclaim memory
and their personal heritage on their own terms. Writing the self thus
becomes a means of overcoming, or of healing from this trauma imposed
not only by society, but also by memory, as it overturns the socio-political
oppression and gendered repression forced on the author by revoking this
through the narrative voice.
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Suggested citation
Vassallo, H. (2008), ‘Embodied memory: war and the remembrance of wounds
in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1: 2,
pp. 189–200, doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.189/1
Contributor details
Helen Vassallo is Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter (UK). Her research
specialisms are contemporary French and francophone women’s writing, life writ-
ing and illness narratives, mythologies of war and illness, and literary representa-
tions of conflict and trauma in French and francophone women’s writing. She has
published several research articles in these areas, as well as a monograph titled
Jeanne Hyvrard, Wounded Witness: The Body Politic and the Illness Narrative, (Oxford:
Lang, 2007). Contact: Dr Helen Vassallo, University of Exeter, Department of
Modern Languages, Queen’s Building, The Queen’s Drive, Exeter, EX4 4QH.
E-mail: H.M.Vassallo@ex.ac.uk
200 Helen Vassallo

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Miscellaneous. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.201/7
Noticeboard
Compiled by Stacy Gillis Newcastle University
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202 Stacy Gillis

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Noticeboard 203
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204 Stacy Gillis

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Noticeboard 205
Kadavifci-Orellana, S. Ayse (2007), Standing on an Isthmus: Islamic Narratives on

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Leffler, Melvyn P. (2007), For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union,
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British at War, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
Litvin, Nikolai (2007), 800 Days on the Eastern Front: A Russian Soldier Remembers
World War II (trans. Stuart Britton), Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
206 Stacy Gillis

Lorenz-Meyer, Martin (2007), Safehaven: The Allied Pursuit of Nazi Assets Abroad,
Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Lowther, Adam B. (2007), Americans and Asymmetric Conflict: Lebanon, Somalia and
Afghanistan, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Lucas, Peter (2007), The OSS in World War II Albania: Covert Operations and
Collaborations with Communist Partisans, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
MacKinnon, Mark (2007), The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and
Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union, New York: Carroll & Graf.
Maloney, Sean (2007), Learning to Love the Bomb: Canada’s Nuclear Weapons during
the Cold War, Washington DC: Potomac Books.
Marcus, Aliza (2007), Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for
Independence, New York: New York University Press.
Marolda, Edward (ed.) (2007), The U.S. Navy in the Korean War, Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press.
McLaurin, Melton Alonza (2007), The Marines of Montford Point: America’s First
Black Marines, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Mead, Richard (2007), Churchill’s Lions: A Biographical Guide to the Key Generals of
World War II, Staplehurst: Spellmount.
Meagher, Ilona (2007), Moving a Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and
America’s Returning Troops, New York: Ig.
Mearsheimer, John J. and Walt, Stephen M. (2007), The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Mersky, Peter B. (2007), US Navy and Marine Corps A-4 Skyhawk Units of the
Vietnam War, Oxford: Osprey.
Metres, Philip (2007), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American
Homefront Since 1941, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Miller, Benjamin (2007), States, Nations and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional
War and Peace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, Edward G. (2007), Nothing Less than Full Victory: Americans at War in Europe,
1944–1945, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.
Miller, Richard M. (2007), Funding Extended Conflicts: Korea, Vietnam and the War on
Terror, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Milner, Marc (2007), D-Day to Carpiquet: The North Shore Regiment and the Liberation
of Europe, Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions.
Minear, Richard H. (ed.) (2007), The Scars of War: Tokyo During World War II:
Writings of Takeyama Michio (trans. Richard H. Minear), Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Misra, Amalendu (2007), Politics of Civil War: Conflict, Intervention and Resolution,
London: Routledge.
Mitcham, Samuel W. (2007), Rommel’s Desert Commanders: The Men Who Served the
Desert Fox, North Africa, 1941–1942, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Mockaitis, Thomas R. (2007), The ‘New’ Terrorism: Myths and Reality, Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2006.
Morgan, Matthew J. (2007), A Democracy is Born: An Insider’s Account of the Battle
Against Terrorism in Afghanistan, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Moules, Joan (2007), Tin Hats and Gas Masks, London: Robert Hale.
Muller, Eric L. (2007), American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American
Disloyalty in World War II, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Noticeboard 207
Murphy, David (2007), Irish Regiments in the World Wars, Oxford: Osprey.
Neitzel, Sönke (ed.) (2007), Tapping Hitler’s Generals: Transcripts of Secret
Conversations, 1942–1945 (trans. Geoffrey Brooks), Barnsley: Frontline.
Norris, Marjorie Barron (2007), Medicine and Duty: The World War I Memoir of
Captain Harold W. McGill, Medical Officer, Calgary: University of Calgary Press.
O’Connor, Mike (2007), Nieuports in RNAS, RFC and RAF Service, London: Cross &
Cockade International.
Oded, Owenheim (2007), Predators and Parasites: Persistent Agents of Transnational
Harm and Great Power Authority, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
O’Donnell, Lynne (2007), High Tea in Mosul: The True Story of Two Englishwoman in
War-torn Iraq, London: Cyan.
O’Hara, Vincent P. (2007), The U.S. Navy against the Axis: Surface Combat,
Oliver, G.J. (2007), War, Food, and Politics in Early Hellenistic Athens, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
O’Reilly, Charles T. (2007), The Jews of Italy, 1938–1945: An Analysis of Revisionist
Histories, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
Owens, Patricia (2007), Between War and Politics: International Relations and the
Thought of Hannah Arendt, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Palmer, Alan Warwick (2007), The Salient: Ypres, 1914–1918, London: Constable.
Paris, Michael (ed.) (2007), Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film
and Television, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Park, Carl. D. (2007), Ironclad Down: The USS Merrimack–CSS Virginia from Construction
to Destruction, Amherst, MA: Naval Institute Press.
Parker, Bernard S. (2007), World War I Sheet Music: 9,670 Patriotic Songs Published
in the United States, 1914–1920, With More than 600 Covers Illustrated,
Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
Patterson, David S. (2007), The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and
Citizen Diplomacy in World War I, London: Routledge.
Pattinson, Juliette (2007), Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing and the Special
Operations Executive in the Second World War, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Paulson, Daryl S. and Krippner, Stanley (2007), Haunted by Combat: Understanding
PTSD in War Veterans, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Pearlstine, Norman (2007), Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War
over Anonymous Sources, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Percy, Sarah (2007), Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perry, Nicholas (ed.) (2006), Major General Oliver Nugent and the Ulster Decision
1915–1918, Stroud: Sutton.
Peterson, John (2007), Oman’s Insurgencies: The Sultanate’s Struggle for Supremacy,
London: Saqi.
Pfaelzer, Jean (2007), Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, New
York: Random House.
Pinheiro, John C. (2007), Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil–Military
Relations During the Mexican War, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Podhoretz, Norman (2007), World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,
New York: Doubleday.
208 Stacy Gillis

Polk, William (2007), Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerrilla
War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, New York: HarperCollins.
Pollard, Tony, and Banks, Iain (eds) (2007), War and Sacrifice: Studies in the
Archaeology of Conflict, Leiden: Brill.
Posner, Richard A. (2007), Countering Terrorism: Blurred Focus, Halting Steps,
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Presbey, Gail M. (ed.) (2007), Philosophical Perspectives on the ‘War on Terrorism’,
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Primoratz, Igor (ed.) (2007), Civilian Immunity in War, Oxford: Clarendon.
Purbrick, Louise, Aulich, Jim and Dawson, Graham (eds) (2007), Contested Spaces:
Sites, Representations and Histories of Conflict, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Quigley, John (2007), The Ruses for War: American Interventionism since World War II,
Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books.
Rae, Patricia (ed.) (2007), Modernism and Mourning, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell
University Press.
Randolph, Stephen P. (2007), Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger, and the
Easter Offensive, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Richards, Peter Judson (2007), Extraordinary Justice: Military Tribunals in Historical
and International Context, New York: New York University Press.
Rickman, Gregg J. (2007), Conquest and Redemption: A History of Jewish Assets from
the Holocaust, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Ridley, Sarah (2007), Children and World War II, London: Franklin Watts.
Robbins, Mary Susannah (ed.) (2007), Against the Vietnam War: Writings by
Activists, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Robson, Brian (2007), Crisis on the Frontier: The Third Afghan War and the Campaign
in Waziristan, 1919–1920, Stroud: Spellmount.
Robson, Stuart (2007), The First World War, 2nd edn., Harlow: Longman.
Rockoff, Hugh (2007), Keep on Scrapping: The Salvage Drives of World War II,
Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Rodin, D.E. (ed.) (2007), War, Torture and Terrorism: Ethics and War in the 21st
Century, Oxford: Blackwell.
Rottman, Gordon (2007), US Airborne Units in the Pacific Theater, 1942–45, Oxford:
Osprey.
Ruelland, Jacques G. (2007), Holy War: History of an Idea (trans. Cornelia
Fuykschot and Jeanne Poulin), Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Russell, John (2007), Chechnya: Russia’s ‘War on Terror’, London: Routledge.
Salama-Carr, Myriam (ed.) (2007), Translating and Interpreting Conflict,
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Schmidt, Elizabeth (2007), Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958,
Athens: Ohio University Press.
Schmitz, Helmut (ed.) (2007), A Nation of Victims? Representations of Wartime
Suffering from 1945 to the Present, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Schneider, Thomas F. and Wagner, Hans (eds) (2007), ‘Huns’ vs. ‘Corned Beef ’:
Representations of the Other in American and German literature and Film on World
War I, Göttingen: V & R Unipress.
Schofield, Julian (2007), Militarization and War, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schroder, William, and Dawe, Ronald (2007), Soldier’s Heart: Close-Up Today with
PTSD in Vietnam Veterans, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Noticeboard 209
Schroer, Timothy L. (2007), Recasting Race After World War II: Germans and African
Americans in American-Occupied Germany, Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Scott, Peter Dale (2007), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Secunda, Eugene and Morgan, Terence P. (2007), Selling War to America: From the
Spanish American War to the Global War on Terror, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Segev, Tom (2007), 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle
East (trans. Jessica Cohen), New York: Metropolitan Books.
Sémelin, Jacques (2007), Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and
Genocide (trans. Cynthia Schoch), New York: Columbia University Press.
Shaw, Tony (2007), Hollywood’s Cold War, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Shipman, Pat (2007), Femme Fatale: Love, Lies and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari,
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Short, Brian, Watkins, Charles and Martin, John (eds) (2007), The Front Line of
Freedom: British Farming in the Second World War, Exeter: British Agricultural
History Society.
Silbey, David (2007), A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine–American War,
1899–1902, New York: Hill and Wang.
Silkenat, James R. and Shulman, Mark R. (eds) (2007), The Imperial Presidency and
the Consequences of 9/11: Lawyers React to the Global War on Terrorism, Westport,
CT: Praeger.
Smelser, Ronald and Davies, Edward J. (2007), The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi–
Soviet War in American Popular Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Jean (ed.) (2007), Came the Day: Memoirs of Kriegsgefangener 7781, The
Reminiscences of Grenville John Davies, Studley: Brewin.
Smith, Jeffrey R. (2007), A People’s War: Germany’s Political Revolution, 1913–1918,
Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Smith, T.O. (2007), Britain and the Origins of the Vietnam War: UK Policy in Indo-
China, 1943–50, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Solomon, Lewis D. (2007), Paul D. Wolfowitz: Visionary, Intellectual, Policymaker and
Strategist, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Spector, Ronald H. (2007), In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the
Battle for Postwar Asia, New York: Random House.
Stasse, Nicol and van der Heyden, Ulrich (2007), German Publications on the Anglo-
Boer War, Pretoria: Protea Book House.
Statler, Kathryn C. (2007), Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in
Vietnam, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Steege, Paul (2007), Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stefanidis, Ioannis D. (2007), Stirring the Greek Nation: Political Culture, Irredentism
and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Steffen, Lloyd, Holy War, Just War: Exploring the Moral Meaning of Religious Violence
(2007), Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Stille, Mark (2007), Imperial Japanese Navy Submarines, 1941–45, Oxford: Osprey.
Stonebridge, Lyndsey (2007), The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-
Century British Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Strachan, Hew (2007), Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography, New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
210 Stacy Gillis

Strachan, Hew and Herberg-Rothe, Andreas (2007), Clausewitz in the Twenty-First

Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Syse, Henrik and Reichberg, Gregory M. (eds) (2007), Ethics, Nationalism and Just
War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives, Washington DC: The Catholic
University of American Press.
Summers, Julie (2007), Remembered: The History of the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission, London: Merrell.
Tan, See Sang (2007), The Role of Knowledge Communities in Constructing
Asia–Pacific Security: How Thought and Talk make War and Peace, Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press.
Taylor, Richard (2007), Homeward Bound: American Veterans Return from War,
Westport, CT: Praeger.
Temple-Raston, Dina (2007), The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough
Justice in an Age of Terror, New York: Public Affairs.
Thakur, Ramesh (2007), War in Our Time: Reflections on Iraq, Terrorism and Weapons
of Mass Destruction, Tokyo: United Nations University Press.
Theoharis, Athan (2007), The Quest for Absolute Security: The Failed Relations among
U.S. Intelligence Agencies, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Thiel, Hans (2007), The Wolves of World War II: An East Prussian Soldier’s Memoir of
Combat and Captivity on the Eastern Front (trans. Ivan Fehrenbach), Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Co.
Topping, Gary (ed.) (2007), If I Get Out Alive: World War II Letters and Diaries of
William McDougall Jr., Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Tracy, Nicholas (2007), Britannia’s Palette: The Arts of Naval Victory, Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Trawick, Margaret (2007), Enemy Lines: Childhood, Warfare and Play in Batticaloa,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tucker, David and Lamb, Christopher J. (2007), United States Special Operations
Forces, New York: Columbia University Press.
Tucker, Robert W. (2007), Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering
America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Tyner, James A. (2007), America’s Strategy in Southeast Asia: From the Cold War to
the Terror War, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Valassopoulos, Anastasia (2007), Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural
Expression in Context, New York: Routledge.
Vellacott, Jo (2007), Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic
Suffragism in Britain during the First World War, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Virden, Jenel (2007), Americans and the Wars of the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Wagner, R. Harrison (2007), War and the State: The Theory of International Politics,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Wasyl, Veryha (2007), A Case Study of Genocide in the Ukrainian Famine of
1921–1923: Famine as a Weapon, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Wells, Helen (2007), Cherry Ames, Veterans’ Nurse, New York: Springer Publishing.
Westemeier, Jens (2007), Joachim Peiper: A Biography of Himmler’s SS Commander
(trans. Christine Wisowaty), Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History.
Westheider, James E. (2007), The African American Experience in Vietnam, Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
——(2007), The Vietnam War, Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Noticeboard 211
Whaley, Barton (2007), Stratagem: Deceptions and Reception in War, Boston: Artech
House.
Wheatcroft, Stephen G. and Welch, Steven R. (eds) (2007), Terror, Total War and
Genocide in the Twentieth Century, special issue of The Australian Journal of Politics
and History, 53: 1.
Wilcox, William A. (2007), The Modern Military and the Environment: The Laws of
Peace and War, Lanham, MD: Government Institutes.
Williams, G.C. (2007), In the Bag: Memoirs of My Captivity and the Events Leading Up
To It, Padstow: Tabb House.
Wilson, Isaiah (2007), Thinking Beyond War: Civil–Military Relations and Why
America Fails to Win the Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Willson, Rachel Beckles (2007), Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold
War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Winfield, Richard Dien (2007), Modernity, Religion, and the War on Terror,
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Winton, Harold R. (2007), Corps Commanders of the Bulge: Six American Generals and
Victory in the Ardennes, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Wise, Harold Lee (2007), Inside the Danger Zone: The U.S. Military in the Persian Gulf,
Wright, Jonathan (2007), Germany and the Origins of the Second World War,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Woodward, David R. (2007), America and World War I: A Selected Annotated
Bibliography of English-Language Sources, London: Routledge.
Wurst, Gayle (ed.) (2007), The General and his Daughter: The Wartime Letters of General
James M. Gavin to his Daughter Barbara, New York: Fordham University Press.
Yin, Tung (ed.) (2007), National Security: Detention, War Powers, and Anti-
Proliferation, New York: William S. Hein.
◊arkov, Dubravka (2007), The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-
Up of Yugoslavia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Zehfuss, Maja (2007), Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zertal, Idith and Eldar, Akiva (2007), Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s
Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (trans. Vivian Eden), New
York: Nation Books.
Zubok, Vladislav M. (2007), A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from
Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Zuccotti, Susan (2007), Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and
Their Flight Through France and Italy, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Exhibitions
• The Treaty of Paris, US National Archives (until January 2009)
Website: www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2007/nr07-127.html
• The Children’s War, Imperial War Museum (until January 2010)
Website: london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/conEvent.381
• Cold War Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum (until January 2009)
Website: london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/conEvent.1728
• Afghanistan: A Glimpse of War, Museum of Civilizations (until April 2008)
Website: www.civilization.ca/expo/ex01e.asp?ExID=324
212 Stacy Gillis

Conferences
• Fifth Raleigh Spy Conference (26–28 March 2008)
Venue: North Caroline Museum of History
Contact: jennifer@metromagazine.net
Website: www.raleighspyconference.com/home/
• Wars and Conflicts in Africa (28–30 March 2008)
Venue: University of Texas at Austin
Contact: africaconf2008@gmail.com
Website: www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/2008/callforpapers.html
• International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War (4–5 April 2008)
Venue: University of Santa Barbara California
Contact: coldwar@wilsoncenter.org
Website: www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/ccws/conference/
• War, Virtual War and Human Security (5–7 May 2008)
Venue: Budapest, Hungary
Contact: ggoldswor@gmail.com
Website: www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/wvw/wvw5/cfp.html
• Le retour à l’intime au sortir de la guerre: De la Première Guerre mondiale à nos
jours. (19–20 June 2008)
Centre d’histoire, Sciences Politiques, Paris
Contact: bruno.cabanes@yale.edu; guillaume.piketty@sciences-po.fr
• Visual Representations of Iran (13–16 June 2008)
Venue: University of St. Andrews
Contact: pedram.khosronejad@st-andrews.ac.uk
Website: www.iranheritage.org/visual-anthropology/
• Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and War in the Modern Age (22–28 June 2008)
Venue: University of Kent
Contact: D.A.Welch@kent.ac.uk
• Seventh European Conference on Information Warfare and Security (30 June–1 July
2008)
Venue: University of Plymouth
Contact: elaine.hayne@academic-conference.org
Website: academic-conferences.org/eciw/eciw2008/eciw08-home.htm
• jus post bellum: Society for Applied Philosophy Conference (4–6 July 2008)
Venue: Manchester University
Contact: admin@appliedphil.org
Website: www.appliedphil.org/AnnualConference2008.shtml
• International Peace Research Association (15–19 July 2008)
Venue: University of Leuven, Belgium
Contact: david.patterson@aya.yale.edu
Website: www.ipra2008.org
• France and New Zealand during the Great War (3–5 November 2008)
Venue: Théâtre des Trois Chênes, Le Quesnoy, France
Contact: philippe@waikato.ac.nz
• Historians Against the War (11–13 November 2008)
Venue: Atlanta, Georgia
Website: www.historiansagainstwar.org
Centres for the study of war

• Centre for First World War Studies, University of Birmingham
Website: www.firstworldwar.bham.ac.uk/
Noticeboard 213
• Scottish Centre for War Studies, University of Glasgow

Website: www.arts.gla.ac.uk/History/Warstud/
• Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies, Liverpool Hope University
Website: www.hope.ac.uk/research/warandpeace/
• Centre for the Study of War, State and Society, University of Exeter
Website: www.huss.ex.ac.uk/history/research/wss/
• The Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health, University of
Melbourne
Website: www.acpmh.unimelb.edu.au/
• The Center for the Study of the Korean War, Graceland University
Website: www.koreanwarcenter.org/index.php
• Middle East Centre, St Anthony’s College, University of Oxford
Website: www.sant.ox.ac.uk/mec/
• Cold War Studies Centre, London School of Economics
Website: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CWSC/
• Center for Cold War Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara
Website: www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/ccws/
• Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary
Website: www.cmss.ucalgary.ca/
• Conflict and Culture Study Group, Bristol University
Website: www.bris.ac.uk/arts/birtha/centres/conflict_culture.html
• Centre for the Cultural History of War, University of Manchester
Website: www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/history/research/cchw/
• Centre for War, Representation and Society, Sussex University
Website: www.sussex.ac.uk/cwrs/1-5.html
• Department of Peace Studies, Bradford University
Website: www.bradford.ac.uk/acad/peace/
• The Second World War Experience Centre, Leeds
Website: www.war-experience.org/index.html
• Research Group for War, Society and Culture, University of Newcastle NSW
Website: www.newcastle.edu.au/centre/wsc/index.html
• Centre for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo
Website: www.prio.no/cscw/about
Submit items for the Noticeboard to:

Dr Stacy Gillis
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Percy Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle, NE1 7RU
Telephone: +44 (0)191 222 7360
E-mail: stacy.gillis@ncl.ac.uk
214 Stacy Gillis

Journal of
Volume One Number Two

ISSN 1752-6272
Journal of War & Culture Studies | Volume One Number Two 2008
War & Culture Studies
Volume 1 Number 2 – 2008 1.2
The Body at War: Wounds, Wounding and the Wounded
119–121 Introduction
Nicola Cooper and Martin Hurcombe
Articles
123–138 ‘They don’t like it up ’em!’: Bayonet fetishization in the British Army Journal of
during the First World War
139–158
Paul Hodges
Painful bodies and brutal women: remedial massage, gender relations
and cultural agency in military hospitals, 1914–18
Ana Carden-Coyne
War & Culture
159–174
175–188
Raising the dead: visual representations of the combatant’s body in
interwar France
Martin Hurcombe
The veteran’s wounded body before the mirror: the dialectic of
Studies
wholeness and disintegration in Andreï Makine’s prose
Helena Duffy
189–200 Embodied memory: war and the remembrance of wounds in Nina
Helen Vassallo
201–214 Noticeboard
Stacy Gillis
intellect Journals | Media & Culture

ISSN 1752-6272
12
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Volume One Number Two

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Journal of War and Culture Studies

Editorial Assistants Board

© 2008 Intellect Ltd. Authorisation to photocopy items for internal or personal

Notes for Contributors

The body at war: wounds, wounding

JWCS 1 (2) pp. 119–121 © Intellect Ltd 2008 119

120 Professor Nicola Cooper and Dr Martin Hurcombe

Forgotten wounds, silenced stories of suffering, but also the spectacle of

The body at war: wounds, wounding and the wounded 121

‘They don’t like it up ’em!’: Bayonet

JWCS 1 (2) pp. 123–138 © Intellect Ltd 2008 123

Similarly, the reported sergeant-major’s training ground cliché which

the utility of the bayonet as a cutlass or dagger proved to be negligible, hence

124 Paul Hodges

Figure 1: Medallion art beloved by soldiers.

126 Paul Hodges

World War? Euphemistic hints in this direction were contained in contem-

128 Paul Hodges

Undermining German masculinity seemed key to supporting Allied masculin-

Again, the reports attempted whenever possible to undermine German mas-

it was a magnificent, though dreadful sight to witness […] To watch the

Concomitant with its prominent position in popular military psychology

There is an immediate tuning up for action, the sharpening of ‘swords’ – as

Trust in ‘cold steel’ as the ultimate effective intimidation, hated by the

130 Paul Hodges

By 1916, bayonet training actually became more dominant in a trainee

Mellersh’s doubts over the pertinence and suitability to British troops of

Campbell’s advice to use short stabs was also memorably reported by

132 Paul Hodges

134 Paul Hodges

This conception of men undergoing a transformation by wielding bayo-

M’Crone is portrayed as the most transformed. MacGill had ‘never heard

To conclude, the fetishization of the bayonet often appeared to have

136 Paul Hodges

Lawrence, J. (2003), ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and Fear of

138 Paul Hodges

Painful bodies and brutal women:

JWCS 1 (2) pp. 139–158 © Intellect Ltd 2008 139

Dominating the industry: female entrepreneurs, teachers

140 Ana Carden-Coyne

of the profession. At Chatham Hospital, treatments rose from a total of

masseuse-in-charge of the Massage Department, Charing Cross Hospital,

Passive bodies and painful therapies

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Figure 1: Reconstruction Aide Massaging Patient’s Leg Stump, Walter Reed

Figure 2: Reconstruction Aide Massaging Patient’s Arm, Walter Reed Army

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Massage involved several forceful techniques. Effleurage (stroking)

Brutal women and the gender politics of pain

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soldier’s un-united shoulder fracture broke in the masseuse’s hands,

contributed to debate over massage, upon which some medical men

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1917a: 425). Electric vibration and mechanical apparatuses with cords,

Representation, intimacy and agency: peppy professionals

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G’s for the Gyms which we love (I don’t think).

Figure 4: C. Coven, ‘I don’t want to be massaged’ and ‘More Massage’, First