War & Virtual War - 2004 Conference Programme Session 4

Session 4: Writing, Rumour and News
Chair: Andrew Wilson

"Gone Home": Boy Scouting and the Writing/Re-Writing of the War in Britain, 1914-1920
Tammy M. Proctor
History Department, Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio, USA

Although some scholars have used soldiers' letters to family members to discover their experiences of war, their connection with home, and their attitudes toward life during the First World War, few have analyzed non-familial networks of letter writing. Using the letters of Boy Scout leaders written to each other and to their Scouts in Britain, I will examine the diverse information system that developed between these Scout comrades. Often close friends and colleagues, these Scout-soldiers tailored their letters to fit the particular relationship and war experience of each of the recipients. For young boys, the former Scoutmasters tried to provide accounts of the excitement of war for the vicarious pleasure of the recipients, sometimes even including war trophies in the envelope. When writing to older former soldiers such as Scout founder, Robert Baden-Powell, Scout correspondents sent cheery accounts of trench life. For their contemporaries, many of whom were not fighting, the Scouts sent sometimes bleaker accounts of their wartime lives. In each case, careful selection of terms and information demonstrates a mixed message of life at the front circulating to these varied civilian audiences.
More than ten thousand Scouts served during the war at the front, and many of those men maintained connections with their troops back home through letters, newsletter articles, essays, and logbooks. At home, boys collected the letters and answered them, sometimes individually, but often as groups, and the boys created elaborate tributes to those who died from their troops. This paper explores the imaginative and psychological connection forged through letter-writing networks. Using the correspondence of five young men, all of whom died in the war, Scout logbooks and records, and Scout official publications, this short paper will raise questions about the nature of news transmission from the front, circulation of information at home, and the imagination/commemoration of war.

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What did the Home front Know? Rumour and Real News in Rural France, 1914-1918
Martha Hanna
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

Scholars of the First World War have long maintained that a fundamental cognitive divide separated those who fought, and thus knew the war firsthand, from those who did not, and thus remained ignorant of its horrors. Gerard J. de Groot's recent study of the war summarizes the judgment of many in this regard when he writes: "a great gulf developed between those at the front and those at home . . . It is perhaps no wonder that soldiers often felt more in common with their enemies than with their own families." Fundamental to this thesis is the belief that combatants rarely told civilians what the war as they experienced it was really like. Because the state reinforced this silence by closely monitoring the press and prohibiting the publication of any news that might have sown discouragement in the civilian ranks, the home-front became insulated not just from any direct experience of the war but from any second-hand knowledge of it as well.
This argument of alienation and ignorance presupposes that civilians, lacking informed contact with those who fought the war gained most of what they knew about it from officially sanctioned sources most especially the daily or weekly press and that they thus supported the war because they did not know what it was really like.
I will challenge this interpretation by arguing that the French home-front remained remarkably aware of developments at the front, even after the French Army imposed systematic censorship of wartime correspondence in December 1916, because they continued to have access to unofficial but authoritative sources of information about the war (primarily, but not exclusively, the correspondence of front-line troops) and that this information gave them an imperfect but nonetheless vivid and visceral understanding of the horrors of war. I will examine in close detail the experience of one village for which the source base is exceptionally rich. Drawing upon departmental archival records, the reports of village school teachers, and the correspondence of a peasant couple who lived in a small village in south-west France, I will argue that although the French state was eager to control and restrict the flow of information from the front to the home front, its efforts were largely unsuccessful because within weeks of the outbreak of war an informal network of communication and exchange, built upon the regular exchange of letters from and to the front, through which front-line soldiers shared their experiences of the war and home front correspondents relayed information about troop movements, military developments, morale, and life under fire to one another and, equally significant, back to their principal correspondents at the front. There thus developed a continuous feed-back loop of information that kept communities that were physically isolated from the front lines in contact with and apprized of developments at the front; that kept local combatants informed of developments at home and in other military sectors; and that effectively negated the efforts of local, regional, and national authorities to keep the home front in cosseted ignorance. To the extent that French civilians supported the national war effort, they did so not because they were ignorant of its horrors but in spite of what they knew of its harsh reality. Insofar as civilians continued to support the war effort as a necessary, if not always noble, enterprise, and thus consented to its sacrifices, theirs was, like the soldiers' with whom they remained in contact, an informed consent.