Propaganda Posters from The Great War

In wartime, even more than at other times, the government is keenly interested in what the citizens believe.

During the First World War the Hun believed that Germany was a nice place, and it was honorable and fitting to fight and die for the Kaiser.

Food was short everywhere.  In fact food was critical to all parties' war effort. Neither Britain nor Germany grew enough food to supply their people, even before war broke out, but imported much of what they needed. The Canadians warned their people to refrain from hoarding.

For some reason corn was not considered good for shipping overseas—perhaps the Europeans didn't know how to cook it—so the home folks were encouraged to eat corn in preference to the more desirable wheat.

Saving food and buying war bonds were the activities most encouraged on the home front.  Here's a First Nations tribesman boasting about his investment in the Patriotic Fund. It's a crappy piece of artwork. I can draw better Indians than that, myself.

In reality the First Nations people had little money to invest in war bonds, but many were keen to go to Europe and fight. Some became war heroes. And speaking of ethnics tussling with the Hun, here is a poster from France depicting a happy African rushing to the fray.

I guess they don't call it a World War for nothing. By the end of it everybody was involved.

The recruiting posters urging the Irish to fight for England's King seem really strange to me. Here I was thinking they would have been just as happy to see him defeated.

But this was not true of all the Irish. A goodly number of Irish men were fighting in the trenches on the side of the Allies. When Roger Casement, that rabid revolutionary, went to Germany to ask for troops and arms to fight for Irish independence, the Germans said they would give him arms but no troops. However, more than 2,000 Irish men were being held in Germany as prisoners of war. If they wanted to fight against the English, they would be allowed to go back to Ireland with Casement.

Only three of these men volunteered. Quite likely they understood that if the rebellion failed they would be hanged, as was Casement, in the event.

Trench warfare was a nasty, futile, and frustrating business. Few were the comforts, what with the mud, the barrages, and the dead piling up, but one thing could always be counted on to bring a spot of relief: tobacco.

Aaah, nothing like a good smoke. And so it goes. More news from the Western front in later posts.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Tales from the Great War

Attention, Downton fans: You will recall from the ghost story I told about my grandmother's midnight visitation in the tower room of Fritwell that my grandfather served in France during World War I as an officer in the Canadian army. While Granny and her sisters and my five-year-old mother were frolicking on the grounds of Fritwell Manor, Grandaddy was in the trenches, battling the Hun.

The unpleasantness of trench warfare is well known. My understanding is that it was much worse than what they show on Downton Abbey. In the beginning when the troops went over the top of the trenches to attack the enemy the British forces still kept to the old model of marching in perfectly disciplined formation. Effective against the French at Waterloo, maybe, but against German machine guns not so much. The 'three on a match' superstition arose in the trenches; by the time the third soldier got his cigarette lit the German snipers had a bead on him.

Most folks who have spent any time on a battlefield are reluctant to talk about it afterwards. Nevertheless Granddaddy told a story to my mother, who told it to me.

My grandfather and a fellow officer, a close friend, were occupying a trench together. It was springtime. The friend was moved to climb out and roam the countryside, which was somehow possible just then. He found a rosebush, or a number of them, all in bloom. He cut the roses and brought them back to the trench with him. It was a moment of beauty, a rare thing in that time and place.

Suddenly a shell came screaming into the trench and my grandfather's friend was killed. There he lay surrounded by roses. It was an image that my grandfather carried in his memory to the end of his life.

Were they in Picardy? I don't know. It would take me a month to research it. Anyway here's the famous song of that era.

Kate Gallison

If you Like Downton Abbey, You'll Love Rupert Brooke

I was a fan of Rupert Brooke. What impressionable young girl wouldn't be? So beautiful, so gifted, so doomed. He wrote deathless poetry and then was killed in The Great War. In the old family cottage at The Ledge — a wide place in the St. Croix River near St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, where once there was a seaport and now there are cottages — one of the books was a volume of Rupert Brooke's poetry. Possibly a first edition. It had a blue cloth cover and used to belong to my great-aunt Kathleen, after whom I was named.

When I was fourteen I used to lie around on the moldy-smelling day bed at the cottage at The Ledge when the tide was out reading Rupert Brooke, listening to recorded Strauss waltzes, and wrecking my teeth with MacIntosh's Taffy. What bliss.

After I was grown my mother and I were visiting one of my other great aunts, the one who was then in possession of the cottage and all that it contained. I came across the book on a low shelf, covered with dust, unread, unloved. "Oh, look," I said to my mother. "Rupert Brooke's book of poetry."

"Take it. Steal it," my mother said. It was the only thing she ever advised me to steal. I had a friend once whose mother used to take her to the supermarket, where they would both slip expensive cuts of meat into their pockets and underwear, but my mother was not that sort of person.

So I took it. When I got it home a dead moth fell out of the back cover, a miller, one of those big things. Someone must have squooshed it there on purpose. But the book was still full of deathless poetry. Here's one of my favorites:

V. The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Kate Gallison