3rd Global Conference
Monday 18th October - Wednesday 20th October 2004
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Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 3: Children, Humour
and War
Chair: Bill Doll
‘Train Yourselves to Defend Your Country’:
Children’s
Novels in the First World War
Dorothea Flothow
SFB 437, Kriegserfahrungen, University of Tubingen Germany
Almost as soon as the
First World War broke out, children’s
writers such as Percy F. Westerman or Herbert Strang, who had before
then written about British colonial and historical wars, started using
the ‘Great War’ as a background to their exciting novels.
These were published in huge numbers, some of them also in magazines.
The following analysis is based on a selection of more than 50 novels
for both boys and girls. The aim of these novels was not just to
entertain their audience, but also to explain what the war was about
and to justify Britain’s role in it. This can be concluded from the prefaces
of various novels as well as from the stories themselves. In order
to justify and explain the war, novelists used themes from contemporary
wartime propaganda and depicted the Germans as the ‘Huns,’ an
uncivilised and militarist people who ill-treated ‘poor little
Belgium’ and disobeyed the laws of ‘civilised warfare.’ They
claimed that the Kaiser had been plotting the war for years and that
Germany alone was responsible for it.
Whereas the novels highlight German war crimes and ‘unsporting’ fighting
methods, the British way of warfare is presented as fair and impeccable.
By emphasizing the righteousness and glory of the British cause, the
novels not only refer to wartime propaganda, they also make use of
the same schemata, narrative strategies, rhetoric and metaphors that
they had already been using in pre-world war novels. These methods
of representing war had been used to depict war as exciting but harmless,
as through them, the dark side of war (death, destruction and defeat)
had been downplayed or denied. The same use was made of them again,
so that even the First World War is described as a glorious adventure,
which would bring fame and honour to all Britons fighting the just
cause.
Through Comic Eyes: Punch, the British
Army, and Pictorial Humour on the Western Front 1914-1918
John Horn
Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
“Humour is both cohesive and divisive; it occupies all points of the sliding scale between affection and cruelty, wit and buffoonery, expression of the status quo and subversion.” Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, June 2001
The British Army’s attritional plight on the
Western Front during the First World War is seldom remembered as inspiring
laughter. Some historians even go so far as to say that tragic
language is the only suitable linguistic form with which to communicate
the events of 1914-1918.
This paper will use the pictorial humour
of Punch, or the London
Charivari to examine the representation of humour in the British
on the Western Front during the Great War. In doing so it will search
for what has thus far been marginalized by the current canonical
scholarship on the conflict. Moreover, it will scrutinize the notion
of humour’s many places on the “sliding scale” (outlined
above by Holman and Kelly) as a means of articulating both the enigmatic
nature of humour itself and, perhaps more importantly, the ambivalent
purposes that laughter served for the English soldiers during the
war. The content, or targets, in this essay will address
the representation of the war itself, leave, the home front, officers,
life in the trenches, camaraderie, and the German enemy, while the
form, or themes, of humour will include punning, incongruity,
farce, and black humour. Cartoons yielded (and still yield) many
levels of historical meaning, and by analyzing Punch, a
source not often examined by historians, this essay will attempt
to remove laughter from the margins of First World War scholarship
and complicate the conflict’s memory by emphasizing that humour
was integral to the war experience. With such an approach, what is
most important for the author and the reader of this project is whether
or not we understand what it means to ‘get’ a joke; especially
as we endeavour to ‘get’ the past.