I am, first and foremost, a social and cultural historian of war and was lucky enough to complete my PhD amongst a collective associated with the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne. This museum, and its network of historians, approaches the study of the First World War from a largely ‘revisionist’ perspective and has thus encouraged me to think in new ways about how to approach the study of conflict across time and space. In turn, while I do not claim to be a historian of the environment, I value the exploratory space the CEAH has offered to reflect and reconsider approaches to conflict studies and war-related topics.
The most obvious connection between war and the environment is the environmental impact of conflict. During the First World War alone, endless quantities of shells, bullets, and shrapnel were hammered into the land. Gas and other chemicals were released into the atmosphere. Millions of men, horses and vehicles traipsed across the globe. Bodies rotted into the ground, along with human and animal waste that resulted from the economy of sustaining massive land armies over four and a half years of fighting. In short, as post-armistice aerial photographs of the Western Front indicate, the landscape was forever changed by the conflict. There are still daily reports of ammunition and explosives being found in the fields of France and Belgium. Along with the cemeteries and memorials that carpet the former battlefields of Europe, it is unclear whether the First World War has ever really relinquished its grip on the landscape.
These are just some simple observations of a non-expert. Much more comprehensive work and analysis is being undertaken within an ever-growing subfield of environmental history that is focussing on the relationship between militaries, war and the environment. Chris Pearson’s new book, Mobilizing Nature: The Environmental History of War and Militarization in Modern France (MUP, 2012) is one such example, stemming from an AHRC-funded large grant project that ran at Bristol University from 2007 – 2010 exploring ‘Militarized Landscapes in the Twentieth Century: Britain, France and the US’. In his book, the concept of mobilization strikes an important chord with the work of John Horne – one of the founding historians of the Historial – whose edited volume, State, Society and Mobilization in Europe During the First World War (CUP, 1997), focuses on one central feature: the political and cultural “mobilization” of the populations of the main belligerent countries in Europe involved in the war. Pearson has added a significant dimension to the question of mobilization by considering the use of nature and environment by militaries and civilians to prepare for, wage, and survive war. The environment is not just a passive setting for warfare (as many military historians would have us think) but is also an active agent that has been used by humans materially and symbolically. If pressed for time, I recommend Marianna Dudley’s excellent review via the IHR’s ‘Reviews in History’ (16th May 2013).
It always strikes me how surprised my students are when I get them to think about how the First World War was not really ‘seen’ by the soldiers who fought in it. Smoke and gas would have restricted their vision, as would the tactic of fighting under the cover of darkness. In many ways it was a visceral rather than visual war. Those in the trenches would have had their vision restricted to ground level, not least owing to the danger of lifting one’s head too high above the sand bag wall. As conflict archaeologist Matt Leonard (also of Bristol University) outlines in his fascinating work on subterranean warfare, ‘the lethal nature of No Man’s Land required men to live below the surface, not on it’. While numerous memorials and cemeteries dominate the landscape where the First World War raged, these represent the dead and not the lived experience of the war. For more on this, see his blog posts via the WW1 Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings website.
In a recent discussion on the International Society for First World War Studies forum, a researcher enquired about the use of trenches prior to the First World War. This sparked an energetic discussion that encouraged me to write this blog post. Christopher Schultz, a PhD candidate in History at Western University, Canada, working on ‘the Social Construction of Space and Place on the Western Front, 1914-1918’ raised the interesting point that trench systems appear around the same time as colonial powers are engaging in rationalizing or creating uniform concepts of space and time according to standardized measures. He sees links, far from coincidental, between these rigid geometric patterns in warfare and developments in irrigation projects amongst Canadian farmers, as well as other 19th century colonial case studies. In these ‘non-wartime’ (I’m not convinced they were entirely pacifist) cases, the land was being carved up into territorial boundaries, sometimes with ditches; often with barbed wire, and had direct connections with the techniques that evolved in the trenches of the First World War. Schultz recommends Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Space and Time, 1880-1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983; 2003), Michael Shapiro’s Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and Reviel Netz’s Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). In summary, if we are going to think about war and the environment it has to be within a framework of reciprocity and exchange. The landscape not only provided the ‘stage’ for war’s violent performance; it also did much to shape the very nature and experience of individual conflicts.