War Stories - Legacies of the First World War

There were large fundraising campaigns to raise money to care for refugees after their arrival. In Leeds, for example, over £10,000 was raised (around £500,000 in today’s money). This generosity was mirrored throughout the country. Around 90% of Belgian refugees returned home within a year of the Armistice, albeit to a very different setting than the one they had left behind. The British government issued free one-way tickets to refugees for a limited period of time, and many Belgian refugees had their employment contracts terminated to encourage their departure. In Belgium, rural and urban areas alike were completely destroyed. In Ypres, inhabitants rebuilt the entirety of their former home in its pre-war image after the city was reduced to rubble.

There are relatively few traces of these refugees left on the landscape of British towns and cities, although in some localities, such as Otley, West Yorkshire, we can see small reminders of their time in this region. In the town square a small plaque marks the donation of a stone monument, gifted by the Belgian refugees to the people of Otley, in thanks for their hospitality. Other Belgians remained in contact with friends and work colleagues for many years after the war, and some visits and reunions took place in subsequent decades.

Edith Howard was sent this ring by a young Belgian man. When they met in Glasgow in 1914, Edith questioned why he was not a soldier. The man returned to Belgium to fight and sent her the ring. His fate is unknown.
This story echoes popular myths surrounding the notorious “white feather campaigns”. Whilst women were encouraged, in wartime propaganda, to denounce, reject, and coerce men who did not volunteer for military service, actual occurrences of such publicly condemnatory acts were not nearly as widespread as popular myths suggest.

Little is known about this china and cloth doll of King Albert of Belgium, except that it was brought to England by a Belgian refugee. Fighting alongside his troops, Albert was very popular and “King Albert’s Day” was celebrated by Belgian refugees living in Britain.

A Belgian refugee who remained in London after the war, Hercule Poirot became one of our greatest, and certainly most fastidious, fictional detectives. His creator, Agatha Christie, encountered real Belgian refugees whilst working as a volunteer nurse in Torquay.

In 1920, the world was introduced to the private detective Hercule Poirot, created by the “Queen of Crime” Agatha Christie. Often mistaken for a “Frenchman” by his suspects, Poirot had served in the Belgian police force until he was forced to flee as a refugee during the First World War. His first case, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was set in 1916 and introduced not only Poirot but also his largely clueless sidekicks Captain Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp. Unlike many real refugees, Poirot decided to stay and received a warm welcome from his friends.

Death on the Nile is one of Poirot’s finest adventures. Set against the dramatic Egyptian landscape, murder soon interrupts Poirot’s holiday. The eventual solution involves a young couple desperate for money and prepared to do anything to get it. Through their plotting and eventual undoing, Agatha Christie explores notions of survival, selfishness and morality in the shadow of the First World War

This money box fashioned from a shell casing was given to a boy by his father. Fighting in the First World War did not just affect those at the front. A generation of children were raised on their parents’ stories or silences.

Our money box was a gift to a boy from his father, a corporal in the Royal Marines. In wartime propaganda, the relationship between parent and child was sometimes used to play on adult men’s conscience. Perhaps most famously, one recruitment poster showed a group of children asking their father “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?”

Many children found themselves growing up in houses which were dominated by the conflict’s shadows and an inability to talk about them. The poet Ted Hughes wrote of how, growing up in the 1930s, the legacy of the war overshadowed his childhood. Hughes struggled to talk about the war directly with his father, afraid to hear his father speak about the horrors and pain of war. His case is an interesting reminder that it was not just war veterans who struggled to articulate their experiences to their families: children also found it difficult to confront the burden of their parents’ past.

Mary’s mother had to look after three daughters, one of whom had Down’s syndrome. To supplement her meagre widow’s pension, Mrs Mason took in washing from neighbours and from local pawn shops. Sometimes they would let her keep clothes which fitted her children as part payment. Mrs. Mason also owned a damask tablecloth which she hired out to neighbours for weddings and funerals.

The three daughters benefitted from a charitable “Boots for the Bairns” campaign run by the Yorkshire Evening Post together with the local council. Schoolteachers would give children a chitty which they could exchange for boots at the local council office. Although this provided Mary and her sisters with shoes, it exposed them to the cruel mockery of other children. Each pair of boots provided by the campaign was marked with three punched holes, to prevent unscrupulous parents pawning them for drinking money.

In the wake of the traumas of war, previous incarnations of horror literature, with their supernatural gas-lit terrors, no longer seemed quite so horrific. Lovecraft therefore set about inventing new terrors. Much of his work, including stories contained within this volume, represented a vision of ‘cosmic horror’ describing ancient gods, deranged cults, sinister aliens and the general indifference of the universe to human life.

Lovecraft also pioneered the “zombie” genre. His tale of an unhinged scientist creating vengeful zombies, Herbert West-Reanimator, was partly set in a field hospital on the Western Front. Fleeing from scandal, Herbert West enlists in the Canadian Army only to discover that the First World War provided an unrivalled source of bodies for “reanimation”. This desecration of the war dead does not go unpunished, as West is disembowelled by a literally headless army doctor who resented West’s decision to reanimate his decapitated body.

Remarque, a German novelist, told the experiences of trench warfare from the perspective of German soldiers, considering the severe mental and physical strain of war, and the difficulties soldiers faced reintegrating into civilian life.

This copy of the classic anti-war novel is dedicated to Herbert Read, “the godfather of the English edition”. Read translated the novel and received Remarque’s permission to soften graphic descriptions which could have hindered its publication.

The book has been immensely popular and widely-read since 1929, selling 2.5 million copies and being published in 22 languages within the first 18 months of publication. It has subsequently been adapted for film, TV, comic book, and radio, and in 1982 Elton John produced a song borrowing Remarque’s title, which told the tale of life in the German trenches.

Siegfried Sassoon joined the British Army at the dawn of the conflict, and fought on the Western Front, where he met and befriended Robert Graves. It was here that Sassoon earned the Military Cross and the nickname “Mad Jack” for his daring and reckless exploits.

Sassoon signed this anthology and transcribed one of his poems for its owner, Vivian de Sola Pinto, who he had fought alongside. Pinto specifically requested that Sassoon copy out a poem which was not concerned with war.

Whilst serving, Sassoon suffered the loss of his brother and many close friends. The reality of warfare soon transformed Sassoon’s poetic style. His romanticised style gave way to the angry, embittered, and sardonic poems which have earned him a place in today’s literary canon. His poetry derides the military elites and governmental officials, war mongers, and the “smug-faced crowds” - those who he depicts as naïve, patriotic civilians on the home-front.

In 1917 Sassoon’s disillusionment reached a very public peak, when he outlined his criticism of the war’s continuation in a letter entitled Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration. Sassoon’s protest condemned the changing motives of the conflict, and the disregard for soldier’s lives, declaring that “the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest”.

Sassoon risked being court-martialled for this act of defiance, which was declared treasonous by many military and parliamentary authorities. Instead, however, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he was treated for the psychological condition neurasthenia. This diagnosis saved Sassoon from disciplinary measures, and allowed the government and military establishment to dismiss his protest as a product of mental breakdown.

Both humorous and tragic, Robert Graves’ memoir explores the war’s traumatic legacy. Haunted by his experiences, he described the book as his “bitter leave-taking” from the past. However, as Graves and many others discovered, it was not always easy or possible to say “goodbye to all that”.

Graves’ memoir encapsulates the idea that a great shift took place in wartime society, and ushered in a new era of social and political change and mass disillusionment.

Good-bye to All That, as well as being Graves’ autobiography of his war experience, considers changes which occurred in the political order and ideologies such as patriotism, pacifism, and religion, as well as dealing with more everyday impacts on marriage and relationships.

Graves’ perception of the war as a calamitous event was influenced by his personal experiences of trench warfare and injury. Graves was, in fact, reported to be dead, and his family notified of his supposedly fatal wound. In actual fact, Graves survived, but he was not left unscathed by his experience.

He suffered from psychological trauma and intense battle nightmares. In his poetry Graves wrote of the “phantom faces” which haunted him, and of seeing “dead men down the morning street”. For Graves, like so many others across the world, the war signalled, if not a large-scale societal transformation, at least a personal shift, leaving its mark on his life and his experiences in the post-war world.